Читать книгу Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845 - Various - Страница 3

Part XIX

Change is the master-spirit of Europe, as permanency is of Asia. The contrast is in the nature of things. However the caprice, the genius, or the necessities, of the sitter on the throne may attempt to impress permanency on the habits of the West, or mutability on those of the East, his success must be but partial. In Europe we have a perpetual movement of minds, a moral ocean, to which tides and currents are an operation of nature. But the Caspian or the Euxine is not more defined by its limits of rock and mountain, or more inexorably separated from the general influx of the waters which roll round the world, than the Asiatic mind is from following the free course, and sharing the bold and stormy innovations, of Europe.

But the most rapid and total change within human memory, was the one which was now before my eye. I felt as some of the old alchymists might feel in their laboratories, with all their crucibles heating, all their alembics boiling, all their strange materials in full effervescence; and their eyes fixed in doubt, and perhaps in awe, on the powerful and hazardous products about to result from combinations untried before, and amalgams which might shatter the roof above their heads, or extinguish their existence by a blast of poison.

I had left Paris Democracy. I found it a Despotism. I had left it a melancholy prey to the multitude; a startling scene of alternate fury and dejection; of cries for revenge, and supplications for bread; of the tyranny of the mob, and the misery of the nation. I now found it the most striking contrast to that scene of despair; – Paris the headquarters of a military government; the Tuileries the palace of a conqueror; every sound martial; the eye dazzled every where by the spoils of the German and Italian sovereignties; the nation flushed with victory. Still, the public aspect exhibited peculiarities which interested me the more, that they could never have appeared in older times, and probably will never return. In the midst of military splendour there was a wild, haggard, and unhappy character stamped on all things. The streets of the capital had not yet felt the influence of that imperial taste which was to render it an imperial city. I saw the same shattered suburbs, the same deep, narrow, and winding streets, the same dismal lanes; in which I had witnessed so often the gatherings of the armed multitude, and which seemed made for popular commotion. Mingled with those wild wrecks and gloomy places of refuge, rather than dwellings, I saw, with their ancient ornaments, and even with their armorial bearings and gilded shields and spears not yet entirely defaced, the palaces of the noblesse and blood-royal of France, the remnants of those ten centuries of monarchy which had been powerful enough to reduce the bold tribes of the Franks to a civilized slavery, and glittering enough to make them in love with their chains. If I could have imagined, in the nineteenth century, a camp of banditti on its most showy scale – a government of Condottieri with its most famous captain at its head – every where a compilation of arms and spoils, the rude habits of the robber combined with the pomp of military triumph – I should have said that the realization was before me.

The Palais Royal was still the chief scene of all Parisian vitality. But the mob orators were to be found there no more. The walks and cafés were now crowed with bold figures, epauleted and embroidered, laughing and talking with the easy air of men who felt themselves masters, and who evidently regarded every thing round them as the furnishing of a camp. The land had now undergone its third stage of that great spell by which nations are urged and roused at the will of a few. The crosier was the first wand of the magician, then came the sceptre – we were now under the spell of the sword. I was delighted at this transformation of France, from the horrid form of popular domination to the showy supremacy of soldiership. It still had its evils. But the guillotine had disappeared. Savage hearts and sanguinary hands no longer made the laws, and executed them. Instead of the groans and execrations, the cries of rage and clamours of despair, which once echoed through all the streets, I now heard only popular songs and dances, and saw all the genuine evidences of that rejoicing with which the multitude had thrown off the most deadly of all tyrannies – its own.

The foreigner shapes every thing into the picturesque, and all his picturesque now was military. Every regiment which passed through Paris on its way from the frontier was reviewed, in front of the palace, by the First Consul; and those reviews formed the finest of all military spectacles, for each had a character and a history of its own. – The regiment which had stormed the bridge of Lodi; the regiment which had headed the assault on the tête-du-pont at Mantua; the regiment which had led the march at the passage of the St Bernard; the regiment which had formed the advance of Dessaix at Marengo – all had their separate distinctions, and were received with glowing speeches and appropriate honours by the chief of the state. The popular vanity was flattered by a perpetual pageant, and that pageant wholly different from the tinsel displays of the monarchy: no representation of legends, trivial in their origin, and ridiculous in their memory; but the revival of transactions in which every man of France felt almost a personal interest, which were the true sources of the new system of nations, and whose living actors were seen passing, hour after hour, before the national eye. All was vivid reality, where all had been false glitter in the days of the Bourbons, and all sullenness and fear in the days of the Democracy. The reality might still be rough and stern, but it was substantial, and not without its share of the superb; it had the sharpness and weight, and it had also the shining, of the sabre. But this was not all; nothing could be more subtly consecutive than the whole progress of the head of the government. In a more superstitious age, it might have been almost believed that some wizard had stood by his cradle, and sung his destiny; or that, like the greatest creation of the greatest of dramatists, he had been met in some mountain pass, or on some lonely heath, and had heard the weird sisters predicting his charmed supremacy. At this period he was palpably training the republic to the sight of a dictatorship. The return of the troops through Paris had already accustomed the populace to the sight of military power.

The movement of vast masses of men by a word, the simplicity of the great military machine, its direct obedience to the master-hand, and its tremendous strength – all were a continued lesson to the popular mind. I looked on the progress of this lesson with infinite interest; for I thought that I as about to see a new principle of government disclosed on the broadest scale – Republicanism in its most majestic aspect, giving a new development of the art of ruling men, and exhibiting a shape of domination loftier and more energetic than the world had ever yet seen. Still, I was aware of the national weaknesses. I was not without a strong suspicion of the hazard of human advance when entrusted to the caprice of any being in the form of man, and, above all, to a man who had won his way to power by arms. Yet, I thought that society had here reached a point of division; a ridge, from which the streams of power naturally took different directions; that the struggles of the democracy were but like the bursting of those monsoons which mark the distinction of seasons in the East; or the ruggedness of those regions of rock and precipice, of roaring torrent and sunless valley, through which the Alpine traveller must toil, before he can bask in the luxuriance of the Italian plain. Attached as I am in the highest degree to the principle of monarchy, and regarding it as the safest anchorage of the state, still, how was I to know that moral nature might not have her reserves of power, as well as physical; that the science of government itself might not have its undetected secrets, as well as the caverns of the earth; that the quiverings and convulsions of society at this moment, obviously alike beyond calculation and control, might not be only evidences of the same vast agencies at work, whose counterparts, in depths below the human eye, shake and rend the soil? Those were the days of speculation, and I indulged in them like the rest of the world. Every man stood, as the islander of the South Sea may stand on his shore, contemplating the conflict of fire and water, while the furnaces of the centre are forcing up the island in clouds of vapour and gusts of whirlwind. All was strange, undefined, and startling. One thing alone seemed certain; that the past régime was gone, never to return; that a great barrier had suddenly been dropped between the two sovereignties; that the living generation stood on the dividing pinnacle between the languid vices of the past system and the daring, perhaps guilty, energies of the system to come. Behind man lay the long level of wasted national faculties, emasculating superstitions, the graceful feebleness of a sensual nobility, and the superb follies of a haughty and yet helpless throne. Before him rose a realm of boundless extent, but requiring frames of vigour, and feelings undismayed by difficulty, to traverse and subdue; – a horizon of hills and clouds, where the gale blew fresh and the tempest rolled; where novel difficulties must be met at every step, but still where, if we trod at all, we must ascend at every step, where every clearing of the horizon must give us a new and more comprehensive prospect, and where every struggle with the rudeness of the soil, or the roughness of the elements, must enhance the vigour of the nerve that encountered them.

Those were dreams; yet I had not then made due allowance for the nature of the foreign mind. I was yet to learn its absence of all sober thought; its ready temptation by every trivially of the hour; its demand of extravagant excitement to rouse it into action, and its utter apathy where its passions were not bribed. I had imagined a national sovereignty, righteous, calm, and resolute, trained by the precepts of a Milton and a Locke; I found only an Italian despotism, trained by the romance of Rousseau and the scepticism of Voltaire.

Every day in the capital now had its celebration, and all exhibited the taste and talent of the First Consul; but one characteristic fête at length woke me to the true design of this extraordinary man – the inauguration of the Legion of Honour. It was the first step to the throne, and a step of incompatible daring and dexterity; it was the virtual restoration of an aristocracy, in the presence of a people who had raved with the rage of frenzy against all titles, who had torn down the coats-of-arms from the gates of the noblesse, and shattered and dug up even the marbles of their sepulchres. A new military caste – a noblesse of the sword – was now to be established. Republicanism had been already "pushed from its stool," but this was the chain which was to keep it fixed to the ground.

The ceremonial was held in the Hotel des Invalides; and all the civil pomp of the consulate was combined with all the military display. The giving of the crosses of honour called forth in succession the names of all those gallant soldiers whose exploits had rung through Europe, in the campaigns of the Alps and the Rhine. Nothing could be more in the spirit of a fine historic picture, or in the semblance of a fine drama. The first men of the French councils and armies stood, surrounded by the monuments of their ancestors in the national glory – the statues of the Condés and Turennes, whose memory formed so large a portion of the popular pride, and whose achievements so solid a record in the history of French triumph. To those high sources of sentiment, all that could be added by stately decoration and religious solemnity was given; and in the chorus of sweet voices, the sounds of martial harmony, the acclamations of the countless multitudes within and without, and the thunder of cannon, was completed the most magnificent, and yet the most ominous, of all ceremonials. It was not difficult to see, that this day was the consecration of France to absolute power, and of all her faculties to conquest. Like the Roman herald, she had put on, in the temple, the robe of defiance to all nations. She was to be from this day of devotement the nation of war. It was less visible, but not less true, that upon the field of Marengo perished the Democracy, but in that temple was sacrificed the Republic. The throne was still only in vision; but its outline was clear, and that outline was colossal.

In my intercourse with the men of the new régime I had associated chiefly with the military. Their ideas were less narrowed by the circle of Paris, their language was frank and free, and their knowledge was more direct and extensive on the topic which I most desired to comprehend, the state of their foreign conquests. I soon had reason to congratulate myself on my choice. One of these, a colonel of dragoons, who had served with Moreau, and whose partialities at least did not lean to the rival hero, came hurriedly to me at an early hour one morning, to "take his leave." But why, and where? "He was ordered to join his regiment immediately, and march for the coast of the Channel." "To invade us?" I asked laughingly. "Not exactly yet, perhaps; but it may come to that in good time. I grieve to tell you," added my gallant friend, with more of gravity than I thought he could possibly have thrown into his good-humoured features, "that we are to have war. The matter is perfectly determined in the Tuileries; and at the levee to-day there will probably be a scene. In the mean time, take my information as certain, and be prepared for your return to England without twenty-four hours' delay." He took his departure.

I attended the levee on that memorable day, and saw the scene. The Place du Carrousel was unusually crowded with troops, which the First Consul was passing in review. The whole population seemed to have conjectured the event of the day; for I had never seen them in such numbers, or with such an evident look of general anxiety. The Tuileries were filled with officers of state, with leading military men, and members of the Senate and Tribunat; the whole body of the foreign ambassadors were present; and yet the entire assemblage was kept waiting until the First Consul had inspected even the firelocks of his guard, and the shoes in their knapsacks. The diplomatists, as they saw from the high casements of the palace this tardy operation going on, exchanged glaces with each other at its contemptuous trifling. Some of the militaires exhibited the impatience of men accustomed to prompt measures; the civilians smiled and shrugged their shoulders; but all felt that there was a purpose in the delay.

At length, the drums beat for the close of the review; the First Consul galloped up to the porch of the palace, flung himself from his charger, sprang up the staircase, and without stopping for etiquette, rushed into the salle, followed by cloud of aides-de-camp and chamberlains. The Circle of Presentations was formed, and he walked hastily round it, saying few rapid words to each. I observed for the first time an aide-de-camp moving on the outside of the circle, step for step, and with his eye steadily marking the gesture of each individual to whom the First Consul spoke in his circuit. This was a new precaution, and indicative of the time. Till then he had run all risks, and might have been the victim of any daring hand. The very countenance of the First Consul was historic; it was as characteristic as his career. It exhibited the most unusual contrast of severity and softness; nothing sterner than the gathering of his brow, nothing more flattering than his smile. On this occasion we had them both in perfection. To the general diplomatic circle his lip wore the smile. But when he reached the spot where the British ambassador stood, we had the storm at once. With his darkest frown, and with every feature in agitation, he suddenly burst out into a tirade against England – reproaching her with contempt of treaties; with an absolute desire for war; with a perpetual passion for embroiling Europe; with forming armaments in the midst of peace; and with challenging France to an encounter which must provoke universal hostilities. The English ambassador listened in silence, but with the air of a high-spirited man, who would concede nothing to menace; and with the countenance of an intelligent one, who could have easily answered declamation by argument. But for this answer there was no time. The First Consul, having delivered his diatribe, suddenly sprang round, darted through the crowd, rushed through a portal, and was lost to the view. That scene was decisive. I saw that war was inevitable. I took my friend's advice, ordered post-horses, and within the twenty-four hours I saw with infinite delight the cliffs of Dover shining in the dawn.

I am not writing a history. I am merely throwing together events separated by great chasms, in the course of a life. My life was all incident; sometimes connected with public transactions of the first magnitude, sometimes wholly personal; and thus I hasten on to the close of a public career which has ended, and of an existence diversified by cloud and sunshine, but on the whole happy.

The war began; it was unavoidable. The objects of our great adversary have been since stripped of their disguise. His system, at the time, was to lull England by peace, until he had amassed a force which would crush her at the outbreak of a war. A few years would have concentrated his strength, and brought the battle to our own shores. But there are higher impulses acting on the world than human ambition; the great machine is not altogether guided by man. England had the cause of nations in her charge; her principles were truth, honour, and justice. She had retained the reverence of her forefathers for the Sanctuary; and the same guidance which had in the beginning taught her wisdom, ultimately crowned her with victory. I lived through a period of the most overwhelming vicissitudes of nations, and of the great disturber himself, who had caused those vicissitudes. I saw Napoleon at the head of 500,000 men on the Niemen; I saw him reduced to 50,000 on the plains of Champagne; I saw him reduced to a brigade at Fontainebleau; I saw him a burlesque of empire at Elba; and I saw him an exile on board a British ship, departing from Europe to obscurity and his grave. These things may well reconcile inferior talents to the changes of fortune. But they should also teach nations, that the love of conquest is national ruin; and that there is a power which avenges the innocent blood. No country on earth requires that high moral more than France; and no country on earth has more bitterly suffered for its perversion. Napoleon was embodied France; the concentrated spirit of her wild ambition, of her furious love of conquest, of her reckless scorn of the sufferings and rights of mankind. Nobler principles have followed, under a wiser rule. But if France draws the sword again in the ambition of Napoleon, she will exhibit to the world only the fate of Napoleon. It will be her last war.

On my arrival in England, I found the public mind clouded with almost universal dejection. Pitt was visibly dying. He still held the nominal reins of government for some period; but the blow had been struck, and his sole honour now was to be, that, like the Spartan of old, he died on the field, and with his buckler on his arm. There are secrets in the distribution of human destinies, which have always perplexed mankind; and one of those is, why so many of the most powerful minds have been cut off in the midst of their career, extinguished at the moment when their fine faculties were hourly more essential to the welfare of science, of government, and of the general progress of society.

I may well comprehend that feeling, for it was my own. I saw Pitt laid in the grave; I looked down into the narrow bed where slept all that was mortal of the man who virtually wielded the whole supremacy of Europe. Yet how little can man estimate the future! Napoleon was in his glory, when Pitt was in his shroud. Yet how infinitely more honoured, and thus more happy, was the fate of him by whose sepulchre all that was noble and memorable in the living generation stood in reverence and sorrow, than the last hour of the prisoner of St Helena! Both were emblems of their nations. The Englishman, manly, pure, and bold, of unshaken firmness, of proud reliance on the resources of his own nature, and of lofty perseverence through good and through evil fortune. The foreigner, dazzling and daring, of singular intellectual vividness, and of a thirst of power which disdained to be slaked but at sources above the ambition of all the past warriors and statesmen of Europe. He was the first who dreamed of fabricating anew the old Roman sceptre, and establishing an empire of the world. His game was for a prodigious stake, and for a while he played it with prodigious fortune. He found the moral atmosphere filled with the floating elements of revolution; he collected the republican electricity, and discharged it on the cusps and pinnacles of the European thrones with terrible effect. But, from the moment when he had dissipated that charm, he lost the secret of his irresistible strength. As the head of the great republic, making opinion his precursor, calling on the old wrongs of nations to level his way, and marshaling the new-born hopes, the ancient injuries, and the ardent imaginations of the continental kingdoms to fight his battles; the world lay before him, with all its barriers ready to fall at the first tread of his horse's hoof. As an Emperor, he forged his own chain.

Napoleon, the chieftain of republicanism, might have revolutionized Europe; Napoleon, the monarch, narrowed his supremacy to the sweep of his sword. Like a necromancer weary of his art, he scattered the whole treasury of his magnificent illusions into "thin air;" flung away his creative wand for a sceptre; and buried the book of his magic "ten thousand fathom deep," to replace it only by the obsolete statutes of courts, and the weak etiquette of governments in decay. Fortunate for mankind that he committed this irrecoverable error, and was content to be the lord of France, instead of being the sovereign of opinion; for his nature was despotic, and his power must have finally shaped and massed itself into a stupendous tyranny. Still, he might have long influenced the fates, and long excited the awe and wonder, of Europe. We, too, might have worshipped his Star, and have forgotten the danger of the flaming phenomenon, in the rapidity and eccentricity of its course, as we saw it eclipsing the old luminaries in succession; until it touched our orbit, and visited us in conflagration.

It was said that Pitt died of a broken heart, in despair of the prospects of England. The defeat of Austerlitz was pronounced his death-blow. What thoughts may cluster round the sleepless pillow, who shall tell? But no man knew England better; none had a bolder faith in her perseverance and principle; none had more broadly laid the foundations of victory in national honour. I shall never be driven into the belief that William Pitt despaired of his country.

He died in the vigour of his genius, in the proudest struggle of the empire, in the midst of the deepest trial which for a thousand years had demanded all the faculties of England. Yet, what man within human recollection had lived so long, if we are to reckon life not by the calendar but by triumphs? What minister of England, what minister of Europe, but himself, was the head of his government for three-and-twenty years? What man had attained so high an European rank? What mind had influenced so large an extent of European interests? What name was so instinctively pronounced by every nation, as the first among mankind? To have earned distinctions like these, was to have obtained all that time could give. Not half a century in years, Pitt's true age was patriarchal.

I was now but a spectator. My connexion with public life was broken off. Every name with which I had been associated was swept away; and I stood like a man flung from ship-wreck upon a shore, where every face which he met was that of a stranger. I was still in Parliament, but I felt a loathing for public exertions. From habit, I had almost identified office with the memorable men whom I had seen governing so long; and the new faces, the new declamation, and the new principles, which the ministerial change brought before me nightly, startled my feelings even less as new than as incongruous. I admitted the ability, the occasional intelligence, and perhaps even the patriotism of the cabinet; but in those reveries, (the natural refuge from a long debate,) memory so often peopled the Treasury Bench with the forms of Pitt and his distinguished coadjutors, and so completely filled my ear with his sonorous periods and high-toned principles, that when I was roused to the reality, I felt as those who have seen some great performer in one of Shakspeare's characters, until no excellence of his successor can embody the conception once more.

I retired from the tumult of London, and returned to tastes which I had never wholly forgotten; taking a small residence within a few miles of this centre of the living world, and devoting my leisure to the enjoyments of that life, which, in the purest days of man, was given to him as the happiest, "to dress the garden, and keep it." Clotilde in all her tastes joined with mine, or rather led them, with the instinctive elegance of a female mind, accomplished in every grace of education. We read, wrote, walked, talked, and pruned our rose-trees and gathered our carnations and violets, together. She had already given me those pledges, which, while they increase the anxiety, also increase the affection, of wedded life. The education of our children was a new source of interest. They were handsome and healthy. Their little sports, the growth of their young perceptions, and the freshness of their ideas, renewed to us both all the delights of society without their exhaustion; and when, after returning from a day spent in the noise and bustle of London, I reached my rustic gate, heard the cheerful voices of the little population which rushed down the flowery avenue to cling upon my neck; and stood at the door of my cottage, with my arm round the waist of my beautiful and fond wife, breathing the evening fragrance of a thousand blooms, and enjoying the cool air, and the purple glories of the sky – I often wondered why men should seek for happiness in any other scene; and felt gratitude, not the less sincere for its being calm and solemn, to the Giver of a lot so nearly approaching to human fulness of joy.

But the world rolls on, let who will slumber among its roses. The political world was awoke by a thunder-clap. Fox died. He was just six months a minister! Such is ambition, such is the world. He died, like Pitt, in the zenith of his powers, with his judgment improved and his passions mitigated, with the noblest prospects of public utility before his eyes, and the majestic responsibilities of a British minister assuming their natural rank in his capacious mind. The times, too, were darkening; and another "lodestar" was thus stricken from the national hemisphere, at the moment when the nation most wanted guidance. The lights which remained were many; but they were vague, feeble, and scattered. The "leader of the starry host" was gone.

I cannot trust myself to speak of this distinguished man; for I was no Foxite. I regarded his policy in opposition as the pleadings of a powerful advocate, with a vast retaining fee, a most comprehensive cause, and a most generous and confiding client. Popularity, popular claims, and the people, were all three made for him beyond all other men; and no advocate ever pleaded with more indefatigable zeal, or more resolute determination. But, raised to a higher position, higher qualities were demanded. Whether they might not have existed in his nature, waiting for the development of time, is the question. But time was not given. His task had hitherto been easy. It was simply to stand as a spectator on the shore, criticising the manœuvres of a stately vessel struggling with the gale. The helm was at last put into his hand; and it was then that he felt the difference between terra firma and the wild and restless element which he was now to control. But he had scarcely set his foot on the deck, when he, too, was swept away. On such brevity of trial, it is impossible to judge. Time might have matured his vigour, while it expanded his views: matchless as the leader of a party, he might then have been elevated into the acknowledged leader of a people. The singular daring, ardent sensitiveness, and popular ambition, which made him dangerous in a private station, might then have found their nobler employment, and been purified in the broad and lofty region of ministerial duty. He might have enlarged the partizan into the patriot, and, instead of being the great leader of a populace, have been ennobled into the great guide of an empire.

But the world never stands still. On the day when I returned from moralising on the vanity of life over the grave of Fox, I received a letter, a trumpet-call to the mêlée, from Mordecai. It was enthusiastic, but its enthusiasm had now taken a bolder direction. "In abandoning England," he told me, "he had abandoned all minor and personal speculations, and was now dealing with the affairs of kingdoms." This letter gave only fragments of his views; but it was easy to see that he contemplated larger results than he ventured to trust to paper.

"You must come and see me here," said he, "for it is only here that you can see me as I ever desired to be seen; or in fact, as nature made me. In your busy metropolis, I was only one of the millions who were content to make a sort of a reptile existence, creeping on the ground, and living on the chances of the day. Here I have thrown off my caterpillar life and am on the wing – a human dragon-fly, if you will, darting at a thousand different objects, enjoying the broad sunshine, and speeding through the wide air. My invincible attachment to my nation here finds its natural object; for the sons of Abraham are here a people. I am a patriarch, with my flocks and herds, my shepherds and clansmen, the sons of my tribe coming to do me honour, and my heart swelling and glowing with the prospects of national regeneration. I have around me a province to which one of your English counties would be but a sheepfold; a multitude of bold spirits, to whom your populace would be triflers; a new nation, elated by their approaching deliverance, solemnly indignant at their past oppression, and determined to shake the land to its centre, or to recover their freedom.

"You will speak of this as the vision of an old man – come to us, and you will see it a splendid reality. But observe, that I expect no miracle. I leave visions to fanatics; and while I acknowledge the Power of Powers, which rides in clouds, and moves the world by means unknown to human weakness, I look also to the human means which have their place in pushing on the wheels of the great system. The army which has broken down the strength of the Continent – the force which, like a whirlwind, has torn such tremendous chasms through the old domains of European power, and has torn up so many of the forest monarchs by the root – the French legions, the greatest instrument of human change since the Gothic invasions, are now marching direct on Poland.

"I have seen the man who is at the head of that army – the most extraordinary being whom Europe has seen for a thousand years – the crowned basilisk of France. I own, that we must beware of his fangs, of the blast of his nostrils, and the flash of his eye. He is a terrible production of nature: but he is on our side, and, even if he should be finally trampled, he will have first done our work. I have had an interview with Napoleon! it was long and animated. He spoke to me as to the chief man of my nation, and I answered him in the spirit of the chief man. He pronounced, that the general change, essential to the true government of Europe, was incapable of being effected without the aid of our people. He spoke contemptuously of the impolicy by which we had been deprived of our privileges, and declared his determination to place us on a height from which we might move the world. But it was obvious to me, that under those lofty declarations there was a burning ambition; that if we were to move the world, it was for him; and that, even then, we were not to move it for the monarch of France, but for the individual. I saw, that he was then the dreamer. Yet his dream was the extravagance of genius. In those hopeless graspings and wild aspirations, I saw ultimate defeat; but I saw also the nerve and muscle of a gigantic mind. In his pantings after immeasurable power and imperishable dominion, he utterly forgot the barrier which time throws before the proudest step of human genius; and that within a few years his head must grow grey, his blood cold, the sword be returned to its sheath, and even the sceptre fall from his withering hand. Still, in our conference, we both spoke the same language of scorn for human obstacles, of contempt for the narrowness of human views, and of our resolution to effect objects which, in many an after age, should fix the eye of the world. But he spoke of immortal things; relying on mortal conjecture and mortal power. I spoke of them on surer grounds. I felt them to be the consummation of promises which nothing can abolish; to be the offspring of power which nothing can resist. The foundation of his structures was policy, the foundation of mine was prophecy. And when his shall be scattered as the chaff of the threshing-floor, and be light as the dust of the balance; mine shall be deep as the centre, high as the heavens, and dazzling as the sun in his glory."

In another portion of his letter, he adverted to the means by which this great operation was to be effected.

"I have been for three days on the Vistula, gazing at the march of the 'Grand Army.' It well deserves the name. It is the mightiest mass of power ever combined under one head; half a million of men. The armies of Persia were gatherings of clowns compared to this incomparable display of soldiership; the armies of Alaric and Attila were hordes of savages in comparison; the armies of ancient Rome alone approached it in point of discipline, but the most powerful Roman army never reached a fifth of its number. I see at this moment before me the conquerors of the Continent, the brigades which have swept Italy, the bayonets and cannon which have broken down Austria, and extinguished Prussia. – The eagles are now on the wing for a mightier prey."

This prediction was like the prayers of the Homeric heroes —

"One half the gods dispersed in empty air."

Poland was not to be liberated; the crisis was superb, but the weapon was not equal to the blow. It was the first instance in which the French Emperor was found inferior to his fortune. With incomparable force of intellect, Napoleon wanted grandeur of mind. It has become the custom of later years to deny him even superiority of intellect; but the man who, in a contest open to all, goes before all – who converts a republic, with all its ardour, haughtiness, and passion, into a monarchy at once as rigid and as magnificent as an Oriental despotism – who, in a country of warriors, makes himself the leading warrior – who, among the circle within circle of the subtlest political intrigues, baffles all intrigues, converts them into the material of his own ascendency, and makes the subtlest and the boldest spirits his instruments and slaves – has given sufficient evidence of the superiority of his talents. The conqueror who beat down in succession all the great military names of Europe, must have been a soldier; the negotiator who vanquished all existing diplomacy, and the statesman who remodelled the laws, curbed the fiery temper, and reduced to discipline the fierce insubordination of a people, whose first victory had crushed the state, and heaped the ruins of the throne on the sepulchre of their king – must have been a negotiator and a statesman of the first rank. Or, if those were not the achievements of intellect, by what were they done? If they were done without it, of what value is intellect? Napoleon had then only found the still superior secret of success; and we deny his intellect, simply to give him attributes higher than belong to human nature. – No man before him dreamed of such success, no man in his day rivalled it, no man since his day has attempted its renewal. "But he was fortunate!" What can be more childish than to attempt the solution of the problem by fortune? Fortune is a phantom. Circumstances may arise beyond the conception of man; but where the feebler mind yields to circumstances, the stronger one shapes, controls, and guides them.

This man was sent for a great purpose of justice, and he was gifted with the faculties for its execution. An act of imperial guilt had been committed, of which Europe was to be purged by penalty alone. The fall of Poland was to be made a moral to the governments of the earth; and Napoleon was to be the fiery brand that was to imprint the sentence upon the foreheads of the great criminals. It is in contemplations like these, that the Spirit of history ministers to the wisdom of mankind. Whatever may be the retribution for individuals beyond the grave, justice on nations must be done in this world; and here it will be done.

The partition of Poland was the most comprehensive and audacious crime of the modern world. It was a deliberate insult, at once to the laws of nations and to the majesty of the great Disposer of nations. And never fell vengeance more immediate, more distinct, or more characteristic. The capital of Austria twice entered over the bodies of its gallant soldiery; Russia ravaged and Moscow burnt; the Prussian army extinguished by the massacre of Jena, and Prussia in a day fettered for years – were the summary and solemn retribution of Heaven. But, when the penalty was paid, the fate of the executioner instantly followed. Guilt had punished guilt, and justice was to be alike done upon all. Napoleon and his empire vanished, as the powder vanishes that explodes the mine. The ground was broken up; the structures of royalty on its surface were deeply fractured; the havoc was complete; but the fiery deposit which had effected the havoc was itself scattered into air.

His re-establishment of Poland would have been an act of grandeur. It would have established a new character for the whole Revolution. It would have shown that the new spirit which had gone forth summoning the world to regeneration, was itself regeneration; that it was not a tempter, but a restorer; that all conquest was not selfish, and all protestation not meant to deceive. If Napoleon had given Poland a diadem, and placed it on the brow of Kosciusko, he would, in that act, have placed on his own brow a diadem which no chance of the field could have plucked away; an imperishable and dazzling answer to all the calumnies of his age, and all the doubts of posterity. He might even have built, in the restoration of the fallen kingdom, a citadel for his own security in all the casualties of empire; but, in all events, he would have fixed in the political heaven a star which, to the last recollection of mankind, would have thrown light on his sepulchre, and borne his name.

The fall of the Foxite ministry opened the way to a new cabinet, and I resumed my office. But we marched in over ruins. In the short period of their power, Europe had been shattered. England had stood aloof and escaped the shock; but to stand aloof then was her crime – her sympathy might have saved the tottering system. Now, all was gone. When we looked over the whole level of the Continent, we saw but two thrones – France and Russia; all the rest were crushed. They stood, but their structure was shattered, stripped of its adornments, and ready to crumble down at the first blow. England was without an ally. We had begun the war with Europe in our line of battle; we now stood alone. Yet, the spirit of the nation was never bolder than in this hour, when a storm of hostility seemed to be gathering round us from every quarter of the world. Still, there were voices of ill omen among our leading men. It was said, that France and Russia had resolved to divide the world between them – to monopolize the East and the West; to extinguish all the minor sovereignties; to abolish all the constitutions; to turn the world into two vast menageries, in which the lesser monarchies should be shown, as caged lions, for the pomp of the two lords-paramount of the globe. I heard this language from philosophers, from orators, even from statesmen; but I turned to the people, and I found the spirit of their forefathers unshaken in them still – the bold defiance of the foreigner, the lofty national scorn of his gasconading, the desire to grapple more closely with his utmost strength, and the willingness, nay, the passionate desire, to rest the cause of Europe on their championship alone. I never heard among the multitude a sound of that despair which had become the habitual language of Opposition. They had answered the call to arms with national ardour. The land was filled with voluntary levies, and the constant cry of the people was – conflict with the enemy, any where, at any time, or upon any terms. More fully versed in their national history than any other European people, they remembered, that in every war with France, for a thousand years, England had finished with victory; that she had never suffered any one decisive defeat in the war, that where the forces of the two nations could come fairly into contact, their troops had always been successful; and that from the moment when France ventured to contest the empire of the seas, all the battles of England were triumphs, until the enemy was swept from the ocean.

The new cabinet formed its plans on the national confidence, and executed them with statesmanlike decision. The struggle on the Continent was at an end; but they resolved to gird it with a chain of fire. Every port was shut up by English guns; every shore was watched by English eyes. Outside this chain, the world was our own. The ocean was free; every sea was traversed by our commerce with as much security as in the most profound peace. The contrast with the Continent was of the most striking order. There all was the dungeon – one vast scene of suffering and outcry; of coercion and sorrow; the conscription, the confiscation, the licensed plunder, the bitter and perpetual insult. The hearts of men died within them, and they crept silently to their obscure graves. Wounds, poverty, and ferocious tyranny, the heart-gnawing pangs of shame, and the thousand thorns which national and conscious degradation strews on the pillow of men crushed by the insolence of a soldiery, wore away the human race; provinces were unpeopled, and a generation were laid prematurely in the grave.

The recollections of the living world will long point to this period as the most menacing portion of all history. The ancient tyrannies were bold, presumptuous, and remorseless monopolies of power; but their pressure scarcely descended to the multitude. It crushed the senator, the patrician, and the man of opulence; as the tempest smites the turrets of the palace, or shatters the pinnacles of the mountain range. But the despotism of France searched the humblest condition of man. It tyrannized over the cottage, as fiercely as it had swept over the thrones. The German or Italian peasant saw his son torn away, to perish in some distant region, of which he knew no more than that it was the grave of the thousands and tens of thousands of his fellow shepherds and vintagers. The despotism of France less resembled the domination of man, from which, with all its vigilance, there is some hope of escape, than the subtlety of a demon, which has an evil and a sting for every heart, and by which nothing can be forgotten, and nothing will be spared. In the whole immense circle of French dominion, no man could lay his head down to rest, with a security that he might not be roused at midnight, to be flung into a captivity from which he was never to return. No man could look upon his property, the earnings of his manhood, the resource for his age, or the provision for his children, without the knowledge that it was at the mercy of the plunderer; no man could look upon the birth of his child, without the bitter consciousness that another victim was preparing for the general sacrifice; nor could see the ripening form or intellect of those who were given to him by Providence for the comfort and companionship of his advancing years, without a conviction that they would be swept away from him. He felt that he would be left unsheltered and alone; and that those in whom his life was wrapt, and whom he would have gladly given his life to save, were destined to perish by some German or Russian bayonet, and make their last bed among the swamps of the Danube or the snows of Poland.

I am not now speaking from the natural abhorrence of the Briton for tyranny alone. The proofs are before the eye of mankind. Within little more than half the first year of the Polish campaign, three conscriptions, of eighty thousand youths each, were demanded from France alone. Two hundred and forty thousand living beings were torn from their parents, and sent to perish in the field, the hospital, and on the march through deserts where winter reigns in boundless supremacy!

Let the man of England rejoice that those terrible inflictions cannot be laid on him, and be grateful to the freedom which protects the most favoured nation of mankind. Arbitrary arrest and the conscription are the two heads of the serpent – either would embitter the existence of the most prosperous state of society; they both at this hour gnaw the vitals of the continental states; they alienate the allegiance, and chill the affections; even where they are mitigated by the character of the sovereigns, they still remain the especial evils which the noblest patriotism should apply all its efforts to extinguish, and the removal of which it would be the most illustrious boon of princes to confer upon their people.

But the ramparts of that empire of slavery and suffering were to be shaken at last. The breach was to be made and stormed by England; Europe was to be summoned to achieve its own deliverance; and England was to move at the head of the proudest armament that ever marched to conquest for the liberties of mankind.

She began by a thunder-clap. The peace with Russia had laid the Czar at the mercy of France. Napoleon had intrigued to make him a confederate in the league against mankind. But the generous nature of the Russian monarch shrank from the conspiracy, and the secret articles of the treaty of Tilsit were divulged to the British cabinet. I shall not now say from what authority they came; but the confidence was spontaneous, and the effect decisive. Those Articles contained the outline of a plan for combining all the fleets of subject Europe, and pouring the final vengeance of war on our shores. The right wing of that tremendous armament was to be formed of the Danish and Russian fleets. This confederacy must be broken up, or we must see a hundred and eighty ships of the line, freighted with a French and Russian army, at the mouth of the Thames. There was not a moment to be lost, if we were to act at all; for a French force was already within a march of the Great Belt, to garrison Denmark. The question was debated in council, in all its bearings. All were fully aware of the hypocritical clamour which would be raised by the men who were lending themselves to every atrocity of France. We were not less prepared for the furious declamation of that professor of universal justice and protector of the rights of neutral nations – the French Emperor. But the necessity was irresistible; the act was one of self-defence; and it was executed accordingly, and with instant and incomparable vigour. A fleet and army were dispatched to the Baltic. An assault of three days gave the Danish fleet into our hands. The confederacy was broken up by the British batteries; and the armament returned, with twenty sail of the enemy's line, as trophies of the best planned and boldest expedition of the war.

Napoleon raged; but it was at finding that England could show a promptitude like his own, sanctioned by a better cause. Denmark complained pathetically of the infringement of peace, before she had "completed her preparations for war;" but every man of political understanding, even in Denmark, rejoiced at her being disburdened of a fleet, whose subsistence impoverished her revenues, and whose employment could only have involved her in fatal hostilities with Britain. Russia was loudest in her indignation, but a smile was mingled with her frown. Her statesmen were secretly rejoiced to be relieved from all share in the fearful enterprise of an encounter with the fleets of England, and her Emperor was not less rejoiced to find, that she had still the sagacity and the courage which could as little be baffled as subdued, and to which the powers of the North themselves might look for refuge in the next struggle of diadems.

This was but the dawning of the day; the sun was soon to rise. Yet, public life has its difficulties in proportion to its height. As Walpole said, that no man knows the human heart but a minister; so no man knows the real difficulties of office, but the man of office. Lures to his passions, temptations to his integrity, and alarms to his fears, are perpetually acting on his sense of honour. To make a false step is the most natural thing in the world under all those impulses; and one false step ruins him. The rumour reached me that there were dissensions in the cabinet; and, though all was smooth to the eye, I had soon sufficient proof that the intelligence was true. A prominent member of the administration was the object of the intrigue. He was an intelligent, high-spirited, and straightforward man, open in language, if the language was not of the most classic order; and bold in his conceptions, if those conceptions were not formed on the most accomplished knowledge. He had attained his high position, partly by public services, but still more by connexion. It was impossible to refuse respect to his general powers, but it was equally impossible to deny the intellectual superiority of his competitor. The contrast which they presented in the House was decisive of their talents for debate. While the one spoke his mind with the uncultured expressions of the moment; the other never addressed the House but with the polished and pointed diction of the orator. He was the most accomplished of debaters. – Always prepared, always pungent, often powerful. Distinguished in early life by scholarship, he had brought all the finer spirit of his studies into the business of public life. He was the delight of the House; and the boundless applause which followed his eloquence, and paid an involuntary tribute to his mastery of public affairs, not unnaturally stimulated his ambition to possess that leading official rank to which he seemed called by the right of nature. The rivalry at length became open and declared; it had been felt too deeply to die away among the casual impressions of public life; it had been suppressed too long to be forgiven on either side; and the crisis was evidently approaching in which it was necessary to take a part with either of those gifted men.

I seldom spent more anxious hours in the course of an anxious life, than during the period of this deliberation. I felt all the fascinations of the man of genius. On the other hand, I respected all the solid and manly qualities of his opponent. In a personal view, the issue of the contest was likely to produce evil to my own views. I was still a dependent upon fortune. I had new ties and interests, which made official income more important to me day by day. In the fall of the administration I must follow the general fate. – In making my decision with the unsuccessful candidate for power, I must go down along with him; and the claims of the competitors were so equally balanced, and both were so distinguished, that it was beyond all conjecture to calculate the result. I, too, was not without many a temptation to perplex my judgment. The rivalry had at length become public, and the friends of each were active in securing opinions among the holders of office. The whole was a lottery, but with my political existence dependent on my escaping a blank. In this dilemma I consulted my oracle, Clotilde. Her quick intelligence decided for me at once. "You must resign," said she. "You value both; you cannot side with either without offending their feelings, or, what I more regard, distressing your own. Both are men of intelligence and honour, and they will understand your motives and respect them. To retain office is impossible."

"But, Clotilde, how can I bear the thought of reducing you and my infants to the discomforts of a narrow income, and the obscurity of a life of retirement?"

"A thousand times better, than you could endure the thought of retaining office against your judgment, or taking a part against a friend. Follow the impressions of your own generous nature, and you will be dearer than ever to Clotilde – even though it condemned us all to the deepest obscurity." Tears gushed into her eyes as she spoke the words; and in her heart she was evidently less of the heroine than in her language: the children had come playing round her feet at the moment; and the family picture of the reverse in our fortunes, filled with this cluster of young faces, unconscious of the chance which lay before them, was too severe a trial for a mother's feelings. Her tears flowed abundantly, and the beating of her heart showed the anguish of her sacrifice. But she still persisted in her determination. As I took leave of her to go down to the House, her last words, as she pressed my hand, were – "Resign, and leave the rest to fortune."

A motion on the subject of the rival claims had been appointed for the evening; and the premier was to open the debate. The House was crowded at an early hour; and as my services were required in the discussion, I postponed the communication of my resolve, until the division should announce that my labours were at an end. But the hour passed away in routine business. Still, the premier did not appear. The anxiety grew excessive. At length whispers ran round the benches, of a rencounter between the two distinguished individuals; and, like all rumours of this nature, the results were pronounced to be of the most alarming kind. The consternation was gradually mitigated by the announcement that one of the combatants remained unhurt, but that the other had received a mortal wound. The House was speedily deserted; and all rushed out to ascertain the truth of this melancholy intelligence. Yet, nothing was to be gathered among the numberless reports of the night, and I returned home harassed almost into fever. The morning quieted the general alarm. The wound was dangerous, but not mortal; and both combatants had sent in their resignation. It was accepted by royalty, and before another night fell; I was sent for by the premier, and offered one of the vacant offices.

Such are the chances of public life. The lottery had been drawn, and mine was a prize. With what feelings I returned on that night to my fireside; with what welcome I was received by my gentle, yet heroic, wife; or with what eyes I glanced upon my infants, as they came to ask the paternal kiss and blessing before they parted for their pillows, I leave to those who know the rejoicing of the heart, to conceive.

Those events had shaken the ministry, as dissensions always have done; and it still cost us many a severe struggle to resist the force of Opposition combined with the clamours of the country. England and France now presented a spectacle unexampled in the annals of hostilities, engaged in a war which seemed interminable – both determined to conquer or perish; both impelled by the most daring courage; yet neither able to inflict the slightest blow upon the other, with but fifteen miles between. France was nearer to Russia, nay, was nearer to the remotest extremity of Asia, than to England. In the midst of the fiercest war, both preserved the attitude of the most profound peace. The lion and the tiger, couching on the opposite sides of some impassable ravine, each watching the fiery eyes and naked fangs of the other, would have been the natural emblems of this hopeless thirst of encounter between the two most powerful and exasperated nations of the earth.

It is no superstition to trace those events to a higher source than man. The conclusion of this vast conflict was already written, in a record above the short-sighted vision and infirm memory of our nature. In all the earlier guilt of Europe, France has been the allotted punisher of the Continent; and England the allotted punisher of France. I make no presumptuous attempt to explain the reason; but the process is incontestable. When private profligacy combines with some atrocious act of public vice to make the crimes of the Continent intolerable, France is sent forth to carry fire and sword to its boundaries, to crush its armies in the field, to sack its cities, and to decimate its population. Then comes the penalty of the punisher. The crimes of France demand purgation. The strength of England is summoned to this stern duty, and France is scourged; her military pride is broken; her power is paralysed, peace follows, and Europe rests for a generation. The process has been so often renewed, and has been completed with such irresistible regularity, that the principle is a law. The period for this consummation was now come once more.

I was sitting in my library one evening, when a stranger was introduced, who had brought a letter from the officer commanding our squadron on the Spanish coast. He was a man of noble presence, of stately stature, and with a countenance exhibiting all the vivid expression of the South. He was a Spanish nobleman from the Asturias, and deputed by the authorities to demand succours in the national rising against the common enemy, Napoleon. I was instinctively struck by the measureless value of resistance in a country which opened to us the whole flank of France; but the intelligence was so wholly unexpected, so entirely beyond calculation, and at the same time so pregnant with the highest results to England, that I was long incredulous. I was prepared to doubt the involuntary exaggeration of men who had every thing at stake; the feverish tone of minds embarked in the most formidable of all struggles; and even the passion of the southern in every event and object, of force sufficient to arouse him into action. But the Asturian was firm in his assurances, clear and consistent in his views, and there was even a candour in his confession of the unprepared state of his country, which added largely to my confidence. Our dialogue was, I believe, unprecedented for the plainness of its enquiries and replies. It was perfectly Lacedæmonian.

"What regular force can Spain bring into the field?"

"None."

"What force has Napoleon in Spain at this moment?"

"At least two hundred and fifty thousand men, and those in the highest state of equipment and discipline."

"And yet you venture to resist?"

"We have resisted, we shall resist, and we shall beat them."

"In what state are your fortresses?"

"One half of them in the hands of the French, and the other half, without garrisons, provisions, or even guns; still, we shall beat them."

"Are not the French troops in possession of all the provinces?"

"Yes."

"Are they not in fact masters of the country?"

"No."

"How am I to reconcile those statements?"

"The French are masters by day; the Spaniards are masters by night."

"But you have none of the elements of national government. You have lost your king."

"So much the better."

"Your princes, nobles, and court."

"So much the better."

"Even your prime minister and whole administration are in the hands of the enemy."

"Best of all!" said the respondent, with a frown like a thunder-cloud.

"What resource, then, have you?"

"The people!" exclaimed the Spaniard, in a tone of superb defiance.

"Still – powerful as a united people are – before you can call upon a British government to embark in such a contest, it must be shown that the people are capable of acting together; that they are not separated by the jealousies which proverbially divide your country."

"Señor Inglese," said the Don, with a Cervantic curl of the lip, "I see, that Spain has not been neglected among the studies of your high station. But Spain is not to be studied in books. She is not to be sketched, like a fragment of a Moorish castle, and carried off in a portfolio. Europe knows nothing of her. You must pass the Pyrenees to conceive her existence. She lives on principles totally distinct from those of all other nations; and France will shortly find, that she never made a greater mistake than when she thought, that even the southern slope of the Pyrenees was like the northern."

"But," said I, "the disunion of your provinces, the extinction of your army, and the capture of your executive government, must leave the country naked to invasion. The contest may be gallant, but the hazard must be formidable. To sustain a war against the disciplined troops of France, and the daring determination of its ruler, would require a new age of miracle." The Spaniard bit his lip, and was silent. "At all events, your proposals do honour to the spirit of your country, and I shall not be the man to throw obstacles in your way. Draw up a memoir; state your means, your objects and your intentions, distinctly; and I shall lay it before the government without delay."

"Señor Inglese, it shall be done. In that memoir, I shall simply say that Spain has six ranges of mountains, all impregnable, and that the Spanish people are resolved to defend them; that the country is one vast natural fortress; that the Spanish soldier can sleep on the sand, can live on the simplest food, and the smallest quantity of that food; that he can march fifty miles a-day; that he is of the same blood as the conquerors of the Moors, and with the soldiers of Charles V.; and that he requires only discipline and leaders to equal the glory of his forefathers." His fine features glanced with manly exultation.

"Still, before I can bring your case before the country, we must be enabled to have an answer for the objections of the legislature. Your provinces are scarcely less hostile to each other than they are to the enemy. What plan can unite them in one system of defence? and, without that union, how can resistance be effectual?"

"Spain stands alone," was the reply. "Her manners, her feelings, and her people, have no examples in Europe. Her war will have as little similarity to the wars of its governments. It will be a war, not of armies, but of the shepherd, of the artificer, the muleteer, the contrabandist – a war of all classes the peasant, the priest, the noble, nay, the beggar on the highway. But this was the war of her ancestors, the war of the Asturias, which cleared the country of the Moors, and will clear it of the French. All Spain a mass of hostility, a living tide of unquenchable hatred and consuming fire – the French battalions, pouring over the Pyrenees, will be like battalions poured into the ocean. They will be engulfed; they will never return. Our provinces are divided, but they have one invincible bond – abhorrence of the French. Even their division is not infirmity, but strength. They know so little of each other that even the conquest of one half of Spain would be scarcely felt by the rest. This will be a supreme advantage in the species of war which we contemplate – a war of desultory but perpetual assaults, of hostilities that cease neither night nor day, of campaigns that know no distinction between summer and winter – a war in which no pitched battles will be fought, but in which every wall will be a rampart, every hollow of the hills a camp, every mountain a citadel, every roadside, and swamp, and rivulet, the place of an ambuscade. We shall have no battalions and brigades, we require no tactics; our sole science will be, to kill the enemy wherever he can be reached by bullet or knife, until we make Spain the tomb of invasion, and her very name an omen, and a ruin to the tyrant on the French throne."

The councils of England in the crisis were worthy of her ancient name. It was resolved to forget the long injuries of which Spain had been the instrument, during her passive submission to the arrogance of her ally and master. The Bourbons were now gone; the nation was disencumbered of that government of chamberlains, maids of honour, and duennas. It was to be no longer stifled in the perfumed atmosphere of court boudoirs, or to be chilled in the damps of the cloister. Its natural and noble proportions were to be left unfettered and undisguised by the formal fashions of past centuries of grave frivolity and decorous degradation. The giant was to rise refreshed. The Samson was to resume his primal purpose; he was no longer to sleep in the lap of his Delilah; the national fame was before him, and, breaking his manacles at one bold effort, he was thenceforth to stand, as nature had moulded him, powerful and prominent among mankind.

These were dreams, but they were high-toned and healthy dreams – the anticipations of a great country accustomed to the possession of freedom, and expecting to plant national regeneration wherever it set foot upon the soil. The cause of Spain was universally adopted by the people and was welcomed by Parliament with acclamation; the appointment of a minister to represent the cabinet in Spain was decided on, and this distinguished commission was pressed upon my personal sense of duty by the sovereign. My official rank placed me above ambassadorships, but a service of this order had a superior purpose. It was a mission of the country, not of the minister. I was to be the instrument of an imperial declaration of good-will, interest, and alliance to a whole people.

In another week, the frigate which conveyed me was flying before the breeze, along the iron-bound shore of Galicia; the brightest and most burning of skies was over my head, the most billowy of seas was dashing and foaming round me, and my eye was in continual admiration of the noble mountain barriers which, in a thousand shapes, guard the western coast of Spain from the ocean. At length the bay of Corunna opened before us; our anchor dropped, and I made my first step on the most picturesque shore, and among the most original people, of Europe. My destination was Madrid; but it was essential that I should ascertain all the facts in my power from the various provincial governments as I passed along; and I thus obtained a more ample knowledge of the people than could have fallen to the lot of the ordinary traveller. I consulted with their juntas, I was present at their festivals, I rode with their hidalgos, and I marched with their troops. One of the peculiarities which, as an Englishman, has always interested me in foreign travel is, that it brings us back to a period different from the existing age at home. All descending from a common stock, every nation of Europe has made a certain advance; but the advance has been of different degrees. Five hundred years ago, they were all nearly alike. In the Netherlands, I continually felt myself carried back to the days of the Protectorate; I saw nearly the same costume, the same formality of address, and the same habits of domestic life. In Germany, I went back a century further, and saw the English primitive style of existence, the same stiff architecture, the same mingling of stateliness and simplicity, not forgetting the same homage to the "divine right of kings." In Spain, I found myself in the thirteenth century, and but for the language, the heat, and the brown visages around me, could have imagined myself in England, in the days when "barons bold" still exercised the rights of feudalism, when gallant archers killed the king's deer without the king's permission, and when the priest was the lawgiver of the land.