for minor offences, chiefly on political suspicion, were ascertained, on the fall of the empire, to be upwards of fifty thousand! Such are the lessons of government given by a legislator from the field.

It is to the honour of England, or rather of that freedom which supplies nerve and virtue to a people, that her determination never gave way. Yet the evils of protracted hostility were now pressing on her with a weight which it required all her fortitude to sustain. The vividness of actual conflict was gone. There was no enemy on the seas to animate her with new triumph; war on land was hopeless against the bulwark of steel that fenced the empire and the vassals of Napoleon. Her pillars of state and war had fallen,-Pitt, Fox, and Nelson,-within a few months of each other. The Berlin and Milan decrees, after working their indescribable ruin on the continent, were gradually sapping her commerce. The enemy had at last detected the vulnerable part of her strength; and England was now less a vigorous and warlike nation, fighting her enemy round the globe, and striking active blows wherever he was to be found; than a great blockaded garrison, waiting within its walls for the attack, forced to husband its materials of support, and preparing to display the last powers of passive fortitude.

In this crisis, when all hope of change had vanished; when, unquestionably, mere valour and energy had done their utmost; and slavery or eternal war seemed to be the only alternative of nations,— an interposition, a single event, unexpected as the descent of a spirit of heaven, threw a sudden light across Europe and summoned the day.

It does not derogate from this high deliverance, which we will believe to have been providential, that it acted by human passions. The profligate habits of the Spanish court had suffered Godoy, an adventurer, to rise to eminence. The king was a man of weak understanding,-the queen was a libertine,—

and Godoy was the open ruler of both. But even in Spain, sunk as it was in the deepest slough of indolence, and kept down there by the heel of the most sullen and jealous superstition that ever oppressed the human mind, there were curses, deep yet loud enough to reach, from time to time, the ear of the minister, and make him anxious to provide some supreme power safer from the knife and the poison. He proposed the partition of Portugal to Napoleon, securing to himself the province of Alentejo in sovereignty, as a recompense for conniving at the march of the French army through Spain. But he had to deal with one whose sagacity foresaw every thing, and whose ambition grasped at every thing. Napoleon seized Portugal, and gave the traitor no share. The treaty of Tilsit, in 1807, relieved him from the chances of northern war, and he next turned upon Spain. The tissue of artifice which he wound round the nerveless understanding of the Spanish court is unrivalled. He alternately sided with the Prince of Asturias against the king, with the king against the prince, and with both against Godoy; until, by mere dexterity, he induced king, queen, prince, and Godoy quietly to give themselves up to him, walk into his prisons, and leave the Spanish throne at his disposal. But there was a scene of blood to come. royal imbeciles were not worth his fury, they had felt but the velvet of the tiger's paw; others were to feel its talons; and they were instantly darted at the throat of Spain. The first announcement of French dominion in the capital was by a massacre! Then awoke the feelings that God has treasured in the heart of man, to save him from the last degradation. That day's blood dyed the robe of the usurper with a colour never to be washed away. The ten millions of Spain rose as one man. Without

Those

leaders, without arms, without military experience, concert, or knowledge, they rushed upon the invaders, and overthrew them like a hurricane. The

French veterans, who had seen the flight of all the disciplined armies of Europe with their princes at their head, were routed and slaughtered by shepherds and tillers of the ground, by women and children; with no other fortresses than the rocks, no other allies than the soil and sky, and no other arms than the first rustic implement that could be caught up for the destruction of a murderer.

It is only due to the feelings of England to declare, that the whole nation rejoiced disinterestedly in this proud attitude of Spain. Whatever might be the advantages of thus recommencing the contest with Napoleon, on a new field, and assisted by auxiliaries in whose cause every heart of Europe sympathized, the first and strongest impulse was an unselfish desire to support the peninsula to the last shilling and last soldier of the kingdom.

Napoleon had long ascended to a height from which he might look down upon the diadems of Europe; but, as if to point the moral of ambition, he was yet suffered, for a moment, to enjoy an actual indulgence and personal splendour of sovereignty, to which all the earlier pomps of his empire were pale. He now sat down to a banquet of kingship, and feasted to the full; while an eye which glanced through the future would have seen his throne smitten under him, and his name a by-word among nations. But, for the moment, Europe had never witnessed so magnificent a spectacle of dominion as Napoleon's court at Erfurt. He was surrounded by the monarchs and princes of the continent in person.

The emperor of Russia with his brother Constantine, daily attended his levees; the emperor of Austria sent an ambassador to apologize for his absence at the feet of this universal king; all the first military and noble names of Europe, marshals, dukes, princes, and prelates, formed his circle. The days were spent in the occupations suitable to this display of royalty; in riding over fields of battle, nego

tiating treaties, and deciding the fates of kingdoms. Prussia was forgiven, at the intercession of Alexander; a new code was vouchsafed to Holland; a peace was proposed to England,-which she firmly refused, unless it should include the freedom of Spain; and the German powers were haughtily commanded to be still and obey. No human being could feel this homage with a keener zest than Napoleon himself. The long possession of a throne had not deadened the slightest nerve of his sense of supremacy;-"Come and play at Erfurt," he wrote to Talma, with the loftiest sneer,—“ you shall play before a pitful of kings."

He broke up the conference, to pour an army of two hundred thousand men upon Spain.

1809.-The Spanish war teemed with great lessons; and the first was, that the only security against public ruin is a free constitution. It would have saved Spain from that miserable spectacle of a depraved and effeminate court, a domineering priesthood, and a decaying people, which invited an invader; and it would have not less supplied the only strength which renders a country unconquerable. The enthusiasm of the Spanish peasantry was beyond all praise; but it expired in a year. Joseph Buonaparte, "the intrusive king," as he was named by his indignant subjects, returned to Madrid; and Napoleon, after having brushed away the undisciplined levies of the juntas, as his charger would a swarm of flies, rode through the peninsula at his

ease.

In one corner of Spain alone he found resistance, a foretaste of that fiery valour which was yet to cost him his diadem. The corps under Moore, after having been endangered alternately by the treason of the Spanish chief, the rashness of the British envoy, and the perplexity of the British general, had at length retired upon Galicia. Napoleon, who felt at all times a personal exasperation against Eng

land, determined to strike a blow at her heart, by utterly crushing this corps: in his own ruthless phrase," he would put all the wives and mothers of England into mourning." He thundered after Moore with a force of forty thousand men.

But he found that the British soldier and sailor were men of the same blood; the spirit of Trafalgar was before him. He ought to have extinguished the retreating army at once: his number amounted to nearly three times theirs: he had all the advantages of command of the country, unlimited resources, high equipment, troops flushed with uncontested victory, and, more than all, his own mighty name: before him was a small body of men, hopeless of the contest, disgusted with the country, uncertain of their general, and in retreat-a word, that of itself throws a damp upon the soldier, and pre-eminently upon the soldier of England. Yet upon that little army the conqueror of the continent was never able to make the slightest impression. The elements fought against them; the rains and snows threw their battalions into disorder; famine unnerved them; they felt no other victors. The wild mountains and dreary defiles of Galicia, proverbial for barrenness, were covered with the dying and the dead, the wreck of the British army, wasted by night-marches, hunger, weariness, and despair: but the bold spirit survived; the sound of a French gun was as the sound of a trumpet; the mutinous were instantly restored to order, the fugitive returned, the wounded forgot their wounds, the famished and the dying started from the ground, gathered their last strength, and died with the musket in their hands.

but

Napoleon's sagacity did not fail him here. A few rencounters of the British rear-guard with the élite of his troops, soon convinced him that at least no glory was to be gained by the pursuit: and after a brief but gallant cavalry action, in which Lords Stewart and Paget broke the squadrons of his favourite regiment