None will in these days deny that our fellow-citizens of
Ireland who went to the war displayed a courage as firm and invincible
as our own:--
"The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man of
excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be
easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I
cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we
are his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought
to have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been
contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
that he has passed ought to have brought back upon him, that from
the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military
genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern
warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat which has made
his name imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies
are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.
"Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at Vimiera
through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war
before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the
moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and
crowded back upon his memory--Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,
Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil
pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House).
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