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Pitt's 'Chequer robe 'tis thine to wear;
Take of his mantle too a share,

"Twill aid thy Ways and Means;
And should Fat Jack and his cabal,
Cry," Rob us the Exchequer, Hal!"
Thou art but in thy teens.

Sidmouth though low his head is laid
Who call'd thee from thy native shade,
And gave thee second birth-

Gave thee the sweets of power and place,
The tufted gown, the gilded mace,
And rear'd thy nameless worth;

Think how his mantle wrapp'd thee round:
Is one of equal virtue found

Among thy new compeers?

Or can thy cloak of Amiens stuff,

Once laugh'd to scorn by Blue and Buff,
Screen thee from Windham's jeers?

When Faction threaten'd Britain's land,
Thy new-made friends-a desperate band,
Like Ahab, stood reproved:

Pitt's powerful tongue their rage could check;
His counsel saved, 'mid mankind's wreck,
The Israel that he loved.

Yes, honour'd shade! whilst near thy grave,
The letter'd sage, and chieftain brave,
The votive marble claim;

O'er thy cold corse the public tear
Congeal'd, a crystal shrine shall rear,

Unsullied as thy fame!"

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SPANISH WAR.

THE deliverance of Europe began, when, to human eyes, it was ruined beyond hope. The continent was at peace the dreadful peace of slavery. The sword was the only instrument of dominion. The final struggle had been made, for even that mutilated independence which nations. could enjoy, in perpetual terror of a French army; and watching, with feverish anxiety, every sign of wrath from a man of blood and avarice, capricious as the winds, and steady only to the one desperate purpose of turning the world into a French dungeon.

The strength of the allies had been successively tried, and found wanting: Austria had been overwhelmed in a three months' campaign;* Prussia in a day. The Russian armies had been driven back on their own territory; and even their partial escape was soon turned into worse than defeat, by the rash and ignominious treaty of Tilsit. In 1807, Napoleon possessed a power unequalled in extent by any monarchy since the

* Closed at Austerlitz, December 26, 1806.

time of Charles V., and immeasurably superior to his in point of effective strength, of opulence, intelligence, and the facility of being directed to any purpose of his ambition. No European sovereign ever possessed such personal supremacy over the means and minds of his subjects. France was a great camp; the people were an army; the government was as simple, rigid, and unquestioned, as the command of a brigade; and Napoleon was the general-in-chief. His business was, to campaign against Europe; and when the campaign was done, his leisure was employed, or amused, in distributing its provinces and crowns to his soldiers.

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In the pause after the overthrow of Russia at Golomyn and Pultusk, he divided his conquests. He gave the crown of Holland to Louis, his brother; annexing Venice to the kingdom of Italy, he gave the whole to his step-son, Beauharnois, as viceroy; he gave the kingdom of Naples to Joseph, his brother; Berg and Cleves to Murat, his brother-in-law; Guastalla to Prince Borghese, another brother-in-law; the principalities of Neufchâtel and Ponte-Corvo to Berthier and Bernadotte; repaid the civil services of Talleyrand with Benevento; and when this was done, resumed his preparations for the seizure of Spain, Portugal, and Poland!..

England was still unconquerable; but she had been severely tried. Her efforts to sustain the cause of Europe had pressed heavily upon her

strength. She had paid all the allied armies; and lavished her wealth, with no return but that of seeing the continent laid at the foot of the enemy. But the struggle had been at a distance; it was now to be brought home.

By the most extraordinary measure in the annals of hostility, the Berlin and Milan decrees, a line of fire was to be drawn round the continent, and England excluded from the intercourse of nations. Napoleon had felt from the beginning that this country was the great antagonist with whom, sooner or later, he must cope for existence. His object was universal despotism: but the continent could not be finally enslaved while there was still one land, from which the words of freedom and courage were perpetually echoing in the general ear; whose trumpet was sounding to every dejected heart of the patriot and the soldier; and whose proud security, fearless opulence, and perfect enjoyment of peace, in the midst of the convulsions of the world, gave unanswerable evidence that freedom was worth the highest sacrifices that could be made by man.

England was inaccessible to the arms of Napoleon, and his arts were now sufficiently known: but if her spirit was not to be humbled, her resources might be dried up; and to this project he applied himself with the singular perseverance and recklessness of his nature. He knew that the first evil must fall upon himself; for the

whole of the immense line of coast stretching from the Meuse to the Vistula, lived upon English commerce; and on the plunder of those provinces depended a large portion of the French revenue! But, at all risks, England was to be ruined. When the deputies from Hamburgh represented to him the havoc that the Berlin and Milan decrees were making in their city, his answer was the brief one of a military tyrant: "What is that to me? The war must not go on for ever. You suffer only like the rest. English commerce must be destroyed."

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This answer was the signal of universal bankruptcy. The recollections of that period in Germany amount to the tragic and the terrible. Perhaps no single act of tyranny had ever inflicted such sweeping misery upon mankind. The whole frame of society was rent asunder, as by a thunderstroke. Property was instantly valueless, or a source of persecution. The merchandise which had been purchased but the day before, under the sanction of the French authorities, and paid every impost levied by the devouring crowd of prefects and plunderers, was torn from the warehouses, and burned before the unfortunate proprietors' eyes.

The casual stagnations of trade, or the change of popular taste for a manufacture, are always the source of miserable suffering. But here was more than stagnation or change: it was utter

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