in the minds of all persons interested in the fate of Tobago, measures were adopted by those in Britain, for obtaining from the court of France some amelioration of their condition. The first step was to select a proper negociator; and for this purpose all eyes were turned towards General Melville, who was requested to repair to Versailles, there to solicit for the unfortunate colonists of Tobago those indulgencies to which, from the terms of the cession, they could form no claim. In acceding to this request, the general, that the application from the new subjects to their new master might appear the more decorous, suggested that a coadjutor should be given to him in the business; and Mr. Young (the present Sir William Young) was joined in the mission.

The success of the application at Versailles exceeded the most sanguine expectations: and to the beneficent magnanimity of the ill fated Louis XVI. on the liberal suggestions of his truly-respectable minister for the navy and the colonies, the late Marshal Duke de Castries, that success was by General M. uniformly attributed. Let it, however, be added by one who, as secretary to the general on that occasion, had indubitable evi. dence of the fact, that the representations of the minister, and the consequent decisions of the sove. reign, were very materially in fluenced by esteem for the charac. ter of General M. and confidence in the manly, candid, and honour able conduct he displayed in every part of the negotiation. The humanity, liberality, and disinterestedness, which had marked the whole of his administration in

Guadaloupe, while it remained under the British flag, and the whole of his general government of the ceded French colonies, had in the persons of some individuals, and in the connections of others of distinction in France, secured for General M. a cordial and confiden. tial reception, which it may have been the happiness of few nego. ciators to possess. At his last interview with M. de Castries, that minister expressed his royal master's entire satisfaction with the general's management of so delicate a negociation; adding, that his majesty was convinced the general had, throughout the whole business, performed the part of a ge nuine and impartial friend and umpire between France and Tobago:

Vous avez agi en vrai tiers was the expression.

Ex pede Herculem.-To present some idea of the spirit by which General M. was actuated in his administration of affairs, civil and military, in Guadaloupe and its dependent islands, the following specimen may suftice :

By the capitulation, the French royal council had been preserved in the full exercise of all its func. tions and privileges, and the French laws, civil and criminal, remained in their original force: the governor, who was, ex officio, president of the council, was the only British subject in that body. At a meeting of the council, in the capital of the island, in 1760, while General M. was seated at the head of the council-table, the board being complete, and the crownlawyers conducting the business of the day, the governor's ears were assailed by a horrid human shriek, proceeding from an enclosed area A 4

under

ber. Springing instinctively from his seat to the window, he beheld a miserable wretch fast bound to a post, fixed upright in the ground, with one leg strained violently back towards the thigh, by means of a strong iron hoop, inclosing both the leg and the thigh, at some distance above and below the knee. Within this hoop, along the front of the leg, was an iron wedge driven in by an executioner, armed with a sledge hammer. Near the sufferer sat, at a small table, a person habited like a judge or magistrate, and a secretary, or clerk, with paper before him, to mark down the declarations to be extorted from the criminal in ago. ny. Filled with horror at this sight, and regardless alike of the assembly around him and of the consequences of his act with respect to himself, the general throw ing open the window, ordered a serjeant in attendance to rush for ward, to prevent a repetition of the stroke on the iron wedge, and to release the wretch from his tor. ture. While this was going for. waid, the members of the council, no strangers to his dispositions, had surrounded the governor at the window, and the attorney-ge. neral of the colony respectfully, but earnestly, remonstrated against this interruption of the course of justice, styling it an infraction of their capitulation, which, in every other point and tittle, he acknow. ledged had been most religiously fulfilled by the governor, whose conduct in his office had, he added, given universal satisfaction.

To these representations, General M. answered, that he had always been, and always would be,

opinion of the colony, by a con. scientious discharge of his duties; but that neither by his natural feelings, nor by his education as a Briton, could he be reconciled to the practice of torture. He concluded by solemnly declaring, that whether torture were or were not authorized by the French laws. a point he did not presume to determine,, such a practice, where be commanded, he never would es. dure, and that they would find his conduct on that occasion, if an infraction of the capitulation, the only infraction on which they would ever have it in their power to complain.

All the members of the council dined that day with the governor; and although the object of kis clemency was reported to have been singularly undeserving, were se cretly well pleased with the oc. currence, and the only effect pro. duced by it on the minds of the in. habitants at large, of Guadaloupe and the other French islands, was to increase the popularity of their British commander, who, while he remained in the West Indies, never heard that recourse was had to torture, in judicial proceedings, either in Guadaloupe, after its re storation to France, or in any other French colony.

Having finally closed his relations with the West Indies, as a governor and commander-in-chief of the forces, with entire satisfaction to all concerned at home and abroad, as well as to his own mind, (for in the seven years during which he discharged all the duties of chancellor in his government, not one appeal from his decisions was brought home to the king

in council,) General M. seized the earliest opportunity of turning his attention to what had always been his favourite study-military his. tory and antiquities. He had already visited Paris, Spa, &c. but the years 1774. 1775, and 1776, be devoted to a tour through France, Switzerland, Italy, Ger. many, the Low Countries, &c. during which, besides the objects of the fine arts, in which he possessed a very delicate taste, with great sensibility of their beauties and defects, he examined the scenes of the most memorable battles, sieges, and other military exploits, recorded in ancient or modern his. tory, from the Portus Itius of Cæsar, on the margin of the English channel, to the Cauna of Polybius, on the remote shores of the Adriatic; and from the fields of Ramilies, to those of Dettingen and Blenheim. With Polybius and Cæsar in his hand, and refer. ing to the most authentic narrations of modern warfare, he traced upon the ground the positions and operations of the most distin. guished commanders of various pe. riods, noting where their judg. ment, skill, and presence of mind, were the most conspicuous, and treasuring up for future use the evidences of the mistakes and er rors, from which the most eminent were not exempted. Relying on the authority of Polybius, and guided by la raison de guerre, or common sense applied to war, he traced the route to Italy pursued by Hannibal, from the point where he crossed the Rhone, in the neighbourhood of Roquemaure, up the left bank of that river, nearly to Vienne, across Dauphiné, to the entrance of the moun

tains at Les Echelles, along the vale to Chamberry, up the banks of the Isere, by Conflans and Moustier, over the gorge of the Alps, called the Little St. Bernard, and down their eastern slopes by Aosti, and Ivrea, to the plains of Piedmont, in the neighbourhood of Turin.

In tracing this route, which seems to have been strangely dis. regarded by commentators, histo rians, and antiquarians, of the greatest note, although certainly the most obvious for that illus. trious Carthaginian to have fol. lowed, General M. found the nature of the country, the distances, the situations of the rivers, rocks, and mountains, most accurately to tally with the circumstances related by Polybius; nay, even the Leucopetron, that celebrated crux criticorum, he discoverd still to subsist in its due position, and still to be known under the identi cal denomination of La Roche Blanche. Not satisfied, however, with the evidence arising from so many coincidences, General M. crossed and re-crossed the Alps, in various other directions, pointed out for the track of Hannibal's march: but of those not one could, without doing great vio. lence indeed to the text of Polybius, be brought in any reasonable way to correspond to the narra. tive.

Newton is reported to have said, that if he possessed any peculiar advantage over his fellow-labourers in the field of science, it consisted merely in his allowing himself to consider matters more patiently and deliberately than the generality of mankind. It was General M.'s practice, in his researches into

truth,

truth, first to collect all the information to be procured on the sub. ject, next to weigh the authorities and evidences, the one against the other, in order to ascertain those to which the greatest credit was to be allowed, and lastly to apply his own reason in tracing out the ob. ject of his inquiry, conformably to the evidences he had approved. By this process, simple in appear ance, but which few men are able to follow, he solved difficulties and discovered truths, which had been abandoned by many able investiga. tors as insoluble and unattainable. On other occasions, when evidences were evenly balanced, or where testimonies were perplexed, his method was to inquire what would be the conduct of a given person, endowed with ordinary faculties, and possessed of a due portion of information on his subject, for the attainment of a certain end. Placing himself thus, in that person's situation, he often arrived at an object which, in the usual mode of research, had remained for ages unknown. Of the former mode of investigation, an example has just been given, in the discovery of the true route of Hannibal across the Alps. Of the latter mode, a pregnant instance was, his theory of the order of battle employed by the ancient Romans. It has been assigned as one reason why military antiquities have been less satisfactorily explained than the other branches of antiquarian research, that scholars and antiquarians have seldom been military men; and that military men have seldom been scholars and antiquarians. Polybius's Treatise on Tactics, has unfortunately perished; and the ether ancient writers who have no.

ticed military affairs, have only mentioned the legionary arrange. ment in battle, in a cursory way, a a subject familiar to their readers: little direct information, therefore, has been afforded by them on the subject. On the revival of learning in Europe, ecclesiastics, and other men of a recluse life, were almost its only encouragers and promo. ters; it is not, therefore, a wonder if these should, by their writings, furnish but little light on this mat. ter. In the end of the sixteenth century, Justus Lipsius, of Loa. vain, a writer not more disun. guished by his learning than by his singularity and love of paradox, sent into the world a system of the Roman art of war, professed to be drawn from certain passages in Polybius. This system, borrowed, with very little acknowledgment indeed, from a preceding work of Patrizzi, of Ferrara, coming from such an author, was implicitly received and repeated by all succeeding writers on the subject. The absurdity, nay, the utter im. practicability, of the Lipsian sys. tem, placed in contrast with the learning and ability of its propa. gator, reduced other inquirers to the necessity of abandoning the matter as altogether inexplicable. Amongst these inquirers was Ge. neral M. when but a young man : but happening in Scotland to be shewn what was called a Roman gladius, or legionary sword, (not, however, genuine,) he discarded at once all his systematic knowledge, and handling the weapon, asked himself is what manner men armed with that sword, in the right hand, and with a legionary shield in the left, ought to be arranged, in order that they might be able to make

the

the best possible use of their arms offensive and defensive. He immediately saw that they ought to be placed, not in deep and dense bodies, as had been supposed, where it would be impossible for them to attain the enemy, but in shallow lines of two, or, at most, three ranks in depth. He discovered also, that the men ought to stand, not in files, or one directly behind another, but the men of the second rank opposite to, and covering, the intervals between the men in the front rank; and those of the third rank, opposite to the intervals between the men in the second rank. In other words, he found that the legionary soldiers were placed in a quincunx order, where every two men in the front and third ranks, forming a paral lelogram in length, from front to rear, the man of the second rank Occupied its centre, where, removed from the men before and behind him, at the greatest possible distance, or half the diagonal of the parallelogram, he had the greatest possible room in the same actual space, and from which he could, without interruption, employ his arms freely before, behind, or on either side, as necessity might require.

This theory once discovered, and duly unfolded, all seeming con tradictions in ancient writers were reconciled, all perplexities were unravelled, and all difficulties were removed.

By a similar train of reasoning, the general had the good fortune to solve the long-contested question respecting the manner of distributing the oars and the rowers, in the wargallies of the ancients. It is evi dent from history, that the an.

cients had vessels of different denominations, called by the Romans, triremes, quadriremes, quinque. remes, &c. and by the Greeks, trières, tetrères, pentères, &c. terms expressive (if the word may be used) of three, four, five rowings, &c. It is also evident, that by these rowings, were meant distinct rows of oars, from stem to stern, of the vessel, raised in order, the one above the other, from the water upwards. Commentators

being in general still more ignorant, if possible, of naval than of military affairs, had propounded the most absurd notions concerning the nature of these ancient ships. The notion, however, the most generally received was, that, the ship's sides being perpendicular, or nearly so, to the surface of the water, the oars were likewise placed vertically, the one immediately over the other below it. Other systems were also broached, tending, in some measure, to obvrate the objections made to the former: but still the best were liable to insurmountable difficul ties, arising from the placing of the rowers, the height of the ship's side, and particularly from the great length and weight of the oars, by which those in the upper rows, or tiers, must have become utterly unmanageable.

From a consideration of these objections, it was concluded by many inquirers on the subject, that the number of rowings related not to the rows of oars, but to the men employed to manage one oar, as is done on board the gallies in the Mediterrancan; so that a trireme, a quinquereme, &c. meant a vessel in which one oar was work. ed by three men, five men, &c.

That