I.

plague, and less to be averted by any human means: it mat- CHAP. tered not what might be the inclinations of the youth, nor what the wishes, principles, and feelings of the parents; he must take the chance of the lot, and as Buonaparte became more eager in his ambition and more prodigal in his expenditure of life, there was scarcely a chance of escaping from it. The chief object of education was to train up the boys in military habits and propensities; and the military was the only profession which offered any thing to their hopes. Commerce had been almost destroyed, less by the maritime war than by the tyranny of Buonaparte, who, in the vain desire of ruining Great Britain, cared not what injury he brought upon his own subjects and his dependent states. Few persons would engage in the study of the liberal professions, because it was not in their free choice to follow them. The official business of the state no longer offered, as in former times, a sure and honourable path to promotion and public esteem; it was reduced to the wretched art of doing whatever the Emperor required, supplying immediate wants by temporary shifts, enforcing oppressive edicts, defending acts of perfidy, inhumanity, and flagrant wrong, and promoting a system of despotism and delusion by all the aids of systematic falsehood. And the Church was in a state of degradation as complete as Degradathat to which Julian would have reduced it; it had been stripped church. of its respectability as well as of its wealth. Buonaparte had hardly condescended to treat its re-establishment as any thing more than a mere matter of expediency: and when the Pope was brought to Paris for the purpose of crowning a man who had publicly professed himself an enemy to the Cross, the ceremonies of his reception were performed in a spirit of mockery which it was scarcely attempted to conceal. The Bishops of the new establishment, indeed, were not wanting in endeavours to deserve the Emperor's favour; they uttered their maledictions against England,

VOL. I.

H

tion of the

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CHAP. as Balaam would fain have done against the Israelites; and in strains of blasphemous adulation they addressed Buonaparte as one whom the Lord had brought out of the land of Egypt to be the man of his own right hand, the Cyrus whom God had chosen for the accomplishment of his inscrutable designs in regard to the nations of the earth, the Christ of providence, the lion of the tribe of Judah! But if this impious flattery gratified the tyrant to whom it was addressed, it contributed still farther to degrade the clerical character in public estimation. The constitutional clergy were regarded as little better than schismatics by those persons who retained a rooted attachment to the religion of their fathers: hence, in the interior, the churches were deserted by the devout as well as by the infidel; and they who were near enough the frontier went to partake of the ordinances and receive confirmation, from a foreign clergy, because they had no reverence for their own. Public opinion being so decidedly against the national priests, and their stipends precarious in all places, and at the best barely sufficient for a decent maintenance, it followed, as a natural consequence, that a supply of ministers for the service of the altar could not be found. Thus while the laws made every youth look to a military life as the probable allotment of destiny from which he could not escape, the circumstances of France were such as to take away all desire for any other profession.

State of
Europe.

At the head of a nation whose whole activity and talents were thus directed to war as the only pursuit, Buonaparte had realised those schemes of ambition which Louis XIV. had been prevented from accomplishing by Marlborough's consummate abilities as a statesman and a general. He had effected all, and more than all that Louis had designed. The Austrian Netherlands, and all the German states as far as the Rhine, were annexed to France, and the European powers who were

I.

most injured and endangered by this usurpation acquiesced in CHAP. it with hopeless submission. Beyond the Rhine the French were in possession of many strong places, which gave them access into the heart of Germany. Buonaparte was King of Italy, as well as Emperor of France. One of his brothers had been made King of Holland, a second King of Naples, and a third King of Westphalia, all in immediate dependence upon him as the head and founder of the Napoleonic dynasty. The Holy German Empire,.. the Empire, as by a prouder and exclusive title it claimed to be called,.. that venerable and mighty body of which the complicated confusion had hitherto, so it was boasted, been divinely preserved, was dissolved by the defection of its members, and the abdication of its chief. The secondary, and all the inferior powers of which it had been composed, had contracted under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, federatively and individually an alliance with the Emperor Napoleon, offensive and defensive, whereby they were virtually rendered so many feuds of France: the force which they were to bring into the field was determined; and to enable them to raise their respective contingents, the conscription was introduced into these states, as the accompanying curse of French alliance. This Confederacy was extended from Bavaria and the frontiers of Switzerland, to the banks of the Elbe. Switzerland acknowledged Buonaparte as its protector, and continued in peace, with something of the appearance, but little of the reality of independence, till it should suit his purpose to assume the sovereignty without disguise. Prussia, beaten, humbled and dismembered, seemed to exist only by his sufferance. Austria, after three struggles against revolutionary France, each more lamentably misconducted and more disastrous than the last, divorced from the empire, despoiled of the Netherlands, the Brisgaw, the Frickthal, the Vorarlberg, the Tyrol, and all its

I.

CHAP. Italian territories, had no other consolation in the ignominious peace to which it had been forced than that of seeing the house of Brandenburg soon afterwards reduced to a state of greater humiliation. Denmark was in alliance with France, the government rather than the nation co-operating heartily with Buonaparte. Sweden, with an insane king, and a discontented people, maintained against him a war which was little more than nominal. Russia, the only country which seemed secure in its distance, its strength, and the unanimity of its inhabitants,.. the only continental state to which the rest of Europe might have looked as to a conservative power, . . Russia appeared to be dazzled by Buonaparte's glory, duped by his insidious talents, and blindly subservient to his ambition. Spain was entirely subject to his control, its troops and its treasures were more at the disposal of the French government than of its own. Portugal had hitherto been suffered to remain neutral, because Buonaparte from time to time extorted large sums from the Court as the price of its neutrality, and because the produce of the Spanish mines found their way safely through the British cruisers, under the Portugueze flag. England alone perseveringly opposed the projects of this ambitious conqueror, and prevented the possibility of his accomplishing that scheme of universal dominion, which had it not been for her interference he believed to be within his reach.

State of
England.

The situation of England in the year 1807 was more extraordinary than any that is exhibited in the history of former times. After a war, which with the short interval of the peace of Amiens had continued fifteen years, and at the commencement of which all Europe had been leagued with her against revolutionary France, her last reliance upon the continental governments had failed; most of her former allies were leagued against her, and it was manifest that the few states which still

I.

preserved a semblance of neutrality, would soon in like manner CHAP. be compelled into a confederacy with France. The French army and the English navy, two more tremendous powers than old times had ever seen, were opposed to each other without the possibility of coming in conflict. Masters as the French were on the continent, all thoughts of attacking them by land were at an end, and neither they nor their allies dared show their flag upon the sea. England could not in any way lessen the power of France, neither could France subdue, nor in

any way weaken England. The threat of invasion had been laid aside: it had been seriously intended by Buonaparte, but the spirit with which the English people flew to arms, intimidated him, and his gunboats were left to rot in the harbours where with so much cost and care they had been collected. Secured against any such evil by our fleets, and still more by our internal strength, we were carrying on the war equally without fear and without hope.

Portland's

tion.

The state of our home politics was not less remarkable. For Duke of the first time Great Britain was under an administration with- administraout a name; its ostensible head the Duke of Portland never appeared in parliament, and was neither spoken of, nor thought of by the public. He deserves, however, an honourable memorial in British history, for having accepted office in a time of peculiar and extreme difficulty, and thereby enabled the King to form a ministry whose opinions were in unison with his own principles and feelings, and with the wishes and true interests of his people. The other ministers held their places less by their own strength than by the weakness of their opponents, for of all administrations, that to which they had succeeded, had been the most unpopular. From their want of influence in the country, the powerful families being mostly with the opposition, it was thought that they depended too much upon the personal favour of the sovereign, and were more literally the King's servants