These weary groups, pacing the Euston-Square pavements, had often said in their despair, "Were not death in battle better?
Here are we slowly mouldering into nothingness; there we might reach it rapidly, in flaming splendor.
Flame, either of victory to Spain and us, or of a patriot death, the sure harbinger of victory to Spain.

Flame fit to kindle a fire which no Ferdinand, with all his Inquisitions and Charles Tenths, could put out." Enough, in the end of 1829, Torrijos himself had yielded to this pressure; and hoping against hope, persuaded himself that if he could but land in the South of Spain with a small patriot band well armed and well resolved, a band carrying fire in its heart,--then Spain, all inflammable as touchwood, and groaning indignantly under its brutal tyrant, might blaze wholly into flame round him, and incalculable victory be won.

Such was his conclusion; not sudden, yet surely not deliberate either,--desperate rather, and forced on by circumstances.
He thought with himself that, considering Somers Town and considering Spain, the terrible chance was worth trying; that this big game of Fate, go how it might, was one which the omens credibly declared he and these poor Spaniards ought to play.
His whole industries and energies were thereupon bent towards starting the said game; and his thought and continual speech and song now was, That if he had a few thousand pounds to buy arms, to freight a ship and make the other preparations, he and these poor gentlemen, and Spain and the world, were made men and a saved Spain and world.

What talks and consultations in the apartment in Regent Street, during those winter days of 1829-30; setting into open conflagration the young democracy that was wont to assemble there! Of which there is now left next to no remembrance.

For Sterling never spoke a word of this affair in after-days, nor was any of the actors much tempted to speak.