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By the publication of the Supplementary Despatches of the Duke of Wellington, vol. ix., the reputation of Lord Castlereagh will profit by such of his letters as had not appeared before. A writer in the Saturday Review remarks:—

“Contemporaries saw that many small States were crushed by the arrangements of Vienna, and that one or two of the larger monarchies, especially that of Russia, were sensibly strengthened. Therefore they concluded that the aim and end of the Congress of Vienna was to aggrandise the greater monarchies, and that the English Minister, biassed by political prejudices or dazzled by royal condescension, had unworthily lent himself to the accomplishment of that object. As the confidential correspondence of that period makes its appearance bit by bit, we are learning to form a juster estimate of what Lord Castlereagh effected at the Congress. It is hard to set limits to the evils which would have been the result of greater facility or less caution on the part of the English plenipotentiary. That Alexander would, but for Lord Castlereagh’s obstinate resistance, have absorbed the whole of Poland into the Russian empire, and that Prussia would have indemnified herself by the annexation of the whole of Saxony, appears certain; and that France and Austria would have plunged Europe back into war, in their efforts to resist, seems not improbable. The greediness of the Powers who had met to divide the spoil threatened incessantly to bring them into collision; and it was on Lord Castlereagh that the ungracious task of moderating their extravagant pretensions fell. If he had failed, and the Congress had come to the abrupt and angry close which seemed more than once inevitable, Napoleon’s return would have been safe and easy. It was hard, but it was unavoidable, that those who only saw the result in a considerable accession to Alexander’s frontier, should have accused Lord Castlereagh of being his tool, when he had been, in reality, resisting Alexander’s pretensions up to the very brink of war.”

This late justice to the eminent diplomatic services of Lord Castlereagh, reaches us some forty years after his death; thus giving the lie to the coarse and unfeeling ribaldry of the so-called “Liberal,” upon the awful termination of the statesman’s life.