many extraordinary advantages, and chances and by new aggressions, and the menace of success, as he in whose hands it has now of more intolerable evils, drove them into that finally miscarried. The different states, it is league which rolled back the tide of ruin on to be hoped, will never again be found so himself, and ultimately hurled him into the shamefully unprovided for defence-so long insignificance from which he originally sprung. insensible to their danger—and, let us not It is for this reason, chiefly, that we join in scruple at last to speak the truth, so little the feeling, which we think universal in this worthy of being saved-as most of them were country, of joy and satisfaction at the utter at the beginning of that awful period; while destruction of this victim of Ambition,—and there is still less chance of any military sove-at the failure of those negotiations, which reign again finding himself invested with the absolute disposal of so vast a population, at once habituated to war and victory by the energies of a popular revolution, and disposed to submit to any hardships and privations for a ruler who would protect them from a recurrence of revolutionary horrors. That ruler, however, and that population, reinforced by immense drafts from the countries he had already overrun, has now been fairly beaten down by the other nations of Europe at length cordially united by a sense of their common danger. Henceforward, therefore, they show their strength, and the means and occasions of bringing it into action; and the very notoriety of that strength, and of the scenes on which it has been proved, will in all probability prevent the recurrence of any necessity for proving it again. The second ground of rejoicing in the downfal of Bonaparte is on account of the impressive lesson it has read to Ambition, and the striking illustration it has afforded, of the inevitable tendency of that passion to bring to ruin the power and the greatness which it seeks so madly to increase. No human being, perhaps, ever stood on so proud a pinnacle of worldly grandeur, as this insatiable conqueror, at the beginning of his Russian campaign.He had done more-he had acquired moreand he possessed more, as to actual power, influence, and authority, than any individual that ever figured on the scene of European story. He had visited, with a victorious army, almost every capital of the Continent; and dictated the terms of peace to their astonished princes. He had consolidated under his immediate dominion, a territory and population apparently sufficient to meet the combination of all that it did not include; and interwoven himself with the government of almost all that was left. He had cast down and erected thrones at his pleasure; and surrounded himself with tributary kings, and principalities of his own creation. He had connected himself by marriage with the proudest of the ancient sovereigns; and was at the head of the largest and the finest army that was ever assembled to desolate or dispose of the world. Had he known where to stop in his aggres sions upon the peace and independence of mankind, it seems as if this terrific sovereignty might have been permanently established in his person. But the demon by whom he was possessed urged him on to his fate. He could not bear that any power should exist which did not confess its dependence on him. Without a pretext for quarrel, he attacked Russia-insulted Austria-trod contemptuously on the fallen fortunes of Prussia would have left him, though humbled, in possession of a sovereign state, and of great actual power and authority. We say nothing at present of the policy or the necessity, that may have dictated those propositions; but the actual result is far more satisfactory, than any condition of their acceptance. Without this, the lesson to Ambition would have been imperfect, and the retribution of Eternal Justice apparently incomplete. It was fitting, that the world should see it again demonstrated, by this great example, that the appetite of conquest is in its own nature insatiable;— and that a being, once abandoned to that bloody career, is fated to pursue it to the end; and must persist in the work of desolation and murder, till the accumulated wrongs and resentments of the harassed world sweep him from its face. The knowledge of this may deter some dangerous spirits from entering on a course, which will infallibly bear them on to destruction;--and at all events should induce the sufferers to cut short the measure of its errors and miseries, by accomplishing their doom at the beginning. Sanguinary conquerors, we do not hesitate to say, should be devoted by a perpetual proscription, in mercy to the rest of the world. Our last cause of rejoicing over this grand catastrophe, arises from the discredit, and even the derision, which it has so opportunely thrown upon the character of conquerors in general. The thinking part of mankind did not perhaps need to be disabused upon this subject ;-but no illusion was ever so strong, or so pernicious with the multitude, as that which invested heroes of this description with a sort of supernatural grandeur and dignity, and bent the spirits of men before them, as beings intrinsically entitled to the homage and submission of inferior natures. It is above all things fortunate, therefore, when this spell can be broken, by merely reversing the operation by which it had been imposed; when the idols that success had tricked out in the mock attributes of divinity, are stripped of their disguise by the rough hand of misfortune, and exhibited before the indignant and wondering eyes of their admirers, in the naked littleness of humbled and helpless men,-depending, for life and subsistence, on the pity of their human conquerors,-and spared with safety, in consequence of their insignificance.-Such an exhibition, we would fain hope, will rescue men for ever from that most humiliating devotion, which has hitherto so often tempted the ambition, and facilitated the progress of conquerors.It is not in our days, at least, that it will be forgotten, that Bonaparte turned out a mere mortal in the end ;-and neither in our days, nor in those of our children, is it at all | distinction of having kept alive the sacred likely, that any other adventurer will arise to efface the impressions connected with that recollection, by more splendid achievements, than distinguished the greater part of his career. The kind of shame, too, that is felt by those who have been the victims or the instruments of a being so weak and fallible, will make it difficult for any successor to his ambition, so to overawe the minds of the world again; and will consequently diminish the dread, while it exasperates the hatred, with which presumptuous oppression ought always to be regarded. If the downfal of Bonaparte teach this lesson, and fix this feeling in the minds of men, we should almost be tempted to say that the miseries he has inflicted are atoned for; and that his life, on the whole, will have been useful to mankind. Undoubtedly there is no other single source of wretchedness so prolific as that strange fascination by which atrocious guilt is converted into an object of admiration, and the honours due to the benefactors of the human race lavished most profusely on their destroyers. A sovereign who pursues schemes of conquest for the gratification of his personal ambition, is neither more nor less than a being who inflicts violent death upon thousands, and miseries still more agonising on millions, of innocent individuals, to relieve his own ennui, and divert the languors of a base and worthless existence :—and, if it be true that the chief excitement to such exploits is found in the false Glory with which the madness of mankind has surrounded their successful performance, it will not be easy to calculate how much we are indebted to him whose history has contributed to dispel it. Next to our delight at the overthrow of Bonaparte, is our exultation at the glory of England. It is a proud and honourable distinction to be able to say, in the end of such a contest, that we belong to the only nation that has never been conquered ;-to the nation that set the first example of successful resistance to the power that was desolating the world,—and who always stood erect, though she sometimes stood alone, before it. From England alone, that power, to which all the rest had successively bowed, has won no trophies, and extorted no submission; on the contrary, she has been constantly baffled and disgraced whenever she has grappled directly with the might and energy of England. During the proudest part of her continental career, England drove her ships from the ocean, and annihilated her colonies and her commerce. The first French army that capitulated, capitulated to the English forces in Egypt; and Lord Wellington is the only commander against whom six Marshals of France have successively tried in vain to procure any advantage. flame of liberty and the spirit of national independence, when the chill of general apprehension, and the rushing whirlwind of conquest, had apparently extinguished them for ever, in the other nations of the earth. No course of prosperity, indeed, and no harvest of ultimate success, can ever extinguish the regret of all the true friends of our national glory and happiness, for the many preposterous, and the occasionally disreputable expeditions, in which English blood was more than unprofitably wasted, and English_character more than imprudently involved; nor can the delightful assurance of our actual deliverance from danger efface the remembrance of the tremendous hazard to which we were so long exposed by the obstinate misgovernment of Ireland. These, however, were the sins of the Government.-and do not at all detract from the excellent spirit of the People, to which, in its main bearings, it was necessary for the government to conform. That spirit was always, and we believe universally, a spirit of strong attachment to the country, and of stern resolution to do all things, and to suffer all things in its cause;— mingled with more or less confidence, or more or less anxiety, according to the temper or the information of individuals,-but sound, steady and erect we believe upon the whole,-and equally determined to risk all for independence, whether it was believed to be in great or in little danger. Of our own sentiments and professions, and of the consistency of our avowed principles, from the first to the last of this momentous period, it would be impertinent to speak at. large, in discussing so great a theme as the honour of our common country. None of our readers, and none of our censors, can be more persuaded than we are of the extreme insignificance of such a discussion—and not many of them can feel more completely indifferent about the aspersions with which we have been distinguished, or more fully convinced of the ultimate justice of public opinion. We shall make no answer therefore to the sneers and calumnies of which it has been thought worth while to make us the subject, except just to say, that if any man can read what we have written on public affairs, and entertain any serious doubt of our zeal for the safety, the honour, and the freedom of England, he must attach a different meaning to all these phrases from that which we have most sincerely believed to belong to them; and that, though we do not pretend to have either foreseen or foretold the happy events that have so lately astonished the world, we cannot fail to see in them the most gratifying confirmation of the very doctrines we have been the longest and the most loudly abused for asserting. The last sentiment in which we think all The efforts of England have not always candid observers of the late great events must been well directed, nor her endeavours to cordially agree, is that of admiration and pure rouse the other nations of Europe very wisely and unmingled approbation of the magnanitimed-But she has set a magnificent ex-mity, the prudence, the dignity and forbearample of unconquerable fortitude and unalter- ance of the Allies. There has been someable constancy; and she may claim the proud thing in the manner of those extraordinary transactions as valuable as the substance of what has been achieved, and, if possible, still more meritorious. History records no instance of union so faithful and complete-of councils so firm-of gallantry so generous of moderation so dignified and wise. In reading the addresses of the Allied Sovereigns to the people of Europe and of France; and, above all, in tracing every step of their demeanour after they got possession of the metropolis, we seem to be transported from the vulgar and disgusting realities of actual story, to the beautiful imaginations and exalted fictions of poetry and romance. The proclamation of the Emperor Alexander to the military men who might be in Paris on his arrival-his address to the Senate-the terms in which he has always spoken of his fallen adversary, are all conceived in the very highest strain of nobleness and wisdom. They have all the spirit, the courtesy, the generosity, of the age of chivalry; and all the liberality and mildness of that of philosophy. The disciple of Fenelon could not have conducted himself with more perfect amiableness and grandeur; and the fabulous hero of the loftiest and most philanthropic of moralists, has been equalled, if not outdone, by a Russian monarch, in the first flush and tumult of victory. The sublimity of the scene indeed, and the merit of the actors, will not be fairly appreciated, if we do not recollect that they were arbitrary sovereigns, who had been trained rather to consult their own feelings than the rights of mankind-who had been disturbed on their hereditary thrones by the wanton aggressions of the man who now lay at their mercy-and had seen their territories wasted, their people butchered, and their capitals pillaged, by him they had at last chased to his den, and upon whose capital, and whose people, they might now repay the insults that had been offered to theirs. They judged more magnanimously, however; and they judged more wisely-for their own glory, for the objects they had in view, and for the general interests of humanity. By their generous forbearance, and singular moderation, they not only put their adversary in the wrong in the eyes of all Europe, but they made him appear little and ferocious in comparison; and, while overbearing all opposition by superior force, and heroic resolution, they paid due honour to the valour by which they had been resisted, and gave no avoidable offence to that national pride which might have presented the greatest of all obstacles to their success. From the beginning to the end of their hostile operations, they avoided naming the name of the ancient family; and not in words merely, but in the whole strain and tenor of their conduct, respected the inherent right of the nation to choose its own government, and stipulated for nothing but what was indispensable for the safety of its neighbours. Born, as they were, to unlimited thrones, and accustomed in their own persons to the exercise of power that admitted but little control, they did not scruple to declare publicly, that France, at least, was entitled to a larger measure of freedom; and that the intelligence of its population entitled it to a share in its own government. They exerted themselves sincerely to mediate between the different parties that might be supposed to exist in the state; and treated each with a respect that taught its opponents that they might coalesce without being dishonoured. In this way the seeds of civil discord, which such a crisis could scarcely have failed to quicken, have, we trust, been almost entirely destroyed; and if France escapes the visitation of internal dissension, it will be chiefly owing to the considerate and magnanimous prudence of those very persons to whom Europe has been indebted for her deliverance. In this high and unqualified praise, it is a singular satisfaction to us to be able to say, that our own Government seems fully entitled to participate. In the whole of those most important proceedings, the Ministry of England appears to have conducted itself with wisdom, moderation, and propriety. In spite of the vehement clamours of many in their own party, and the repugnance which was said to exist in higher quarters to any negotiation with Bonaparte, they are understood to have adhered with laudable firmness to the clear policy of not disjoining their country from that great confederacy, through which alone, either peace or victory, was rationally to be expected:-and, going heartily along with their allies, both in their unrivalled efforts and in their heroic forbearance, they too refrained from recognising the ancient family, till they were invited to return by the spontaneous voice of their own nation; and thus gave them the glory of being recalled by the appearance at last of affection, instead of being replaced by force; while the nation, which force would either have divided, or disgusted entire, did all that was wanted, as the free act of their own patriotism and wisdom. Considering the temper that had long been fostered, and the tone that had been maintained among their warmest supporters at home, we think this conduct of the ministry entitled to the highest credit; and we give it our praise now, with the same freedom and sincerity with which we pledge ourselves to bestow our censure, whenever they do any thing that seems to call for that less grateful exercise of our duty. Having now indulged ourselves, by expressing a few of the sentiments that are irresistibly suggested by the events that lie before us, we turn to our more laborious and appropriate vocation of speculating on the nature and consequences of those events. Is the restoration of the Bourbons the best possible issue of the long struggle that has preceded? Will it lead to the establishment of a free government in France? Will it be favourable to the general interests of liberty in England and the rest of the world? These are great and momentous questions,-which we are far from presuming to think we can answer explicitly, without the assistance of that great expositor-time. Yet we should think the man unworthy of the great felicity of having lived to the present day, who could help asking them of himself; and we seem to stand in the particular pre- | new adventurer to preside over an entire new dicament of being obliged to try at least for an answer. The first, we think, is the easiest; and we scarcely scruple to answer it at once in the affirmative. We know, indeed, that there are many who think, that a permanent change of dynasty might have afforded a better guarantee against the return of those ancient abuses which first gave rise to the revolution, and may again produce all its disasters; and that France, reduced within moderate limits, would, under such a dynasty, both have served better as a permanent warning to other states of the danger of such abuses, and been less likely to unite itself with any of the old corrupt governments, in schemes against the internal liberty or national independence of the great European communities. And we are far from underrating the value of these suggestions. But there are considerations of more urgent and immediate importance, that seem to leave no room for hesitation in the present position of affairs. In the first place, the restoration of the Bourbons seems the natural and only certain end of that series of revolutionary movements, and that long and disastrous experiment which has so awfully overshadowed the freedom and happiness of the world. It naturally figures as the final completion of a cycle of convulsions and miseries; and presents itself to the imagination as the point at which the tempest-shaken vessel of the state again reaches the haven of tranquillity from the stormy ocean of revolution. Nor is it merely to the imagination, or through the mediation of such figures, that this truth presents itself. To the coldest reason it is manifest, that by the restoration of the old line, the whole tremendous evils of a disputed title to the crown are at once obviated: For when the dynasty of Napoleon has once lost possession, it has lost all upon which its pretensions could ever have been founded, and may fairly be considered as annihilated and extinguished for ever. The novelty of a government is in all cases a prodigious inconvenience-but if it be substantially unpopular, and the remnants of an old government at hand, its insecurity becomes not only obvious but alarming: Since nothing but the combination of great severity and great success can give it even the appearance of stability. Now, the government of Napoleon was not only new and oppressive, and consequently insecure, but it was absolutely dissolved and at an end, before the period had arrived at which alone the restoration of the Bourbons could be made a subject of deliberation. The chains of the Continent, in fact, were broken at Leipsic; and the Despotic sceptre of the great nation cast down to the earth, as soon as the allies set foot as conquerors on its ancient territory. If the Bourbons were not then to be restored, there were only three other ways of settling the government.-To! leave Bonaparte at the head of a limited and reduced monarchy-to vest the sovereignty in his infant son-or to call or permit some constitution, republican or monarchical, as might be most agreeable to his supporters. The first would have been fraught with measureless evils to France, and dangers to all her neighbours ;-but, fortunately, though it was tried, it was in its own nature imprac ticable: and Napoleon knew this well enough, when he rejected the propositions made to him at Chatillon. He knew well enough what stuff his Parisians and his Senators were made of; and what were the only terms upon which the nation would submit to his dominion. He knew that he had no real hold of the Affections of the people; and ruled but in their fears and their Vanity-that he held his throne, in short, only because he had identified his own greatness with the Glory of France, and surrounded himself with a vast army, drawn from all the nations of Europe, and so posted and divided as to be secured against any general spirit of revolt. The moment this army was ruined therefore, and he came back a beaten and humbled sovereign, he felt that his sovereignty was at an end. To rule at all, it was necessary that he should rule with glory, and with full possession of the means of intimidation. As soon as these left him, his throne must have tottered to its fall. Royalist factions and Republican factions would have arisen in every part of the nation-discontent and insurrection would have multiplied in the capital, and in the provinces-and if not cut off by the arm of some new competitor, he must soon have been overwhelmed in the tempest of civil commotion. The second plan would have been less dangerous to other states, but still more impracticable with a view to France itself. The nerveless arm of an infant could never have wielded the iron sceptre of Napoleon,-and his weakness, and the utter want of native power or influence in the members of his family, would have invited all sorts of pretensions, and called forth to open day all the wild and terrific factions which the terror of his father's power had chased for a season to their dens of darkness. Jealousy of the influence of Austria, too, would have facilitated the deposition of the baby despot;-and even if his state could have been upheld, it is plain that it could have been only by the faithful energy of his predecessor's ministers of oppression,and that the dynasty of Napoleon could only have maintained itself by the arts and the crimes of its founder. The third expedient must plainly have been the most inexpedient and unmerciful of all; since, after the experience of the last twenty years, we may venture to say with confidence, that it could only have led, through a repetition of those monstrous disorders over which reason has blushed and humanity sickened so long, to the dead repose of another military despotism. The restoration of the Bourbons, therefore, we conceive, was an act, not merely of wisdom, but of necessity,-or of that strong and obvious expediency, with a view either to peace or security, which in politics amounts | foster associations favourable to royalty, or to to necessity. It is a separate, however, or at propagate kindly conceptions of the connecleast an ulterior question, whether this res- tion of subject and king;-forgetting, above toration is likely to give a Free Government all, that along with her ancient monarchy, a to France, or to bring it back to the condition new legislative body is associated in the govof its old arbitrary monarchy ? a question cer-ernment of France, that a constitution has tainly of great interest and curiosity, and been actually adopted, by which the powers upon which it does not appear to us that the of those monarchs may be effectually controlpoliticians of this country are by any means led; and that the illustrious person who has agreed. ascended the throne, has already bound himself to govern according to that constitution, and to assume no power with which it does not expressly invest him. There are many, we think, who cannot be brought to understand that the restoration of the ancient line can mean any thing else but the restoration of the ancient constitution of the monarchy, who take it for granted, that they must return to the substantial exercise of all their former functions, and conceive, that all restraints upon the sovereign authority, and all stipulations in favour of public liberty, must be looked upon with contempt and aversion, and be speedily swept away, as vestiges of that tremendous revolution, the whole brood and progeny of which must be held in abhorrence at the Court of the new Monarch:-And truly, when we remember what Mr. Fox has said, with so much solemnity, upon this subject, and call to mind the occasion, with reference to which he has declared, that "a Restoration is, for the most part, the most pernicious of all Revolutions," it is not easy to divest ourselves of apprehensions, that such may in some degree be the consequence of the events over which we are rejoicing. Yet the circumstances of the present case, we will confess, do not seem to us to warrant such apprehensions in their full extent; and our augury, upon the whole, is favourable upon this branch of the question also. They who think differently, and who hope, or fear, that things are to go back exactly to the state in which they were in 1788; and that all the sufferings, and all the sacrifices, of the intermediate period, are to be in vain, look only, as it appears to us, to the naked fact, that the old line of kings is restored, and the ancient nobility re-established in their honours. They consider the case, as it would have been, if this restoration had been effected by the triumphant return of the emigrants from Coblentz in 1792-by the success of the Royalist arms in La Vendée-or by the general prevalence of a Royalist party, spontaneously regenerated over the kingdom:-Forgetting that the ancient family has only been recalled in a crisis brought on by foreign successes; when the actual government was virtually dissolved, and no alternative left to the nation, but those which we have just enumerated; forgetting that it is not restored unconditionally, and as a matter of right, but rather called anew to the throne, upon terms and stipulations, propounded in the name of a nation, free to receive or to reject it ;-forgetting that an interval of twenty-five long years has separated the subjects from the Sovereign; and broken all those ties of habitual loyalty, by which a people is most effectually bound to an hereditary monarch; and that those years, filled with ideas of democratic license, or despotic oppression, cannot have tended to If Louis XVIII., then, trained in the school of misfortune, and seeing and feeling all the permanent changes which these twenty-five eventful years have wrought in the condition of his people ;-if this monarch, mild and unambitious as he is understood to be in his character, is but faithful to his oath, grateful to his deliverers, and observant of the counsels of his most prudent and magnanimous Allies, he will feel, that he is not the lawful inheritor of the powers that belonged to his predecessor; that his crown is not the crown of Louis XVI.; and that to assert his privileges, would be to provoke his fate. By this time, he probably knows enough of the nature of his countrymen, perhaps we should say of mankind in general, not to rely too much on those warm expressions of love and loyalty, with which his accession has been hailed, and which would probably have been lavished with equal profusion on his antagonist, if victory had again attended his arms, in this last and decisive contest. It is not improbable that he may be more acceptable to the body of the nation, than the despot he has supplanted; and that some recollections or traditions of a more generous loyalty than the sullen nature of that ungracious ruler either invited or admitted, have mingled themselves with the hopes of peace and of liberty, which must be the chief solid ingredients in his welcome; and acting upon the constitutional vivacity of the people, and the servility of mobs, always ready to lackey the heels of the successful, have taken the form of ardent affection, and the most sincere devotedness and attachment. But we think it is very apparent, that there is no great love or spontaneous zeal for the Bourbons in the body of the French nation; that the joy so tardily manifested for their return, is mainly grounded upon the hope of consequential benefits to themselves; and, at all events, that there is no personal attachment, which will lead them to submit to any thing that may be supposed to be encroaching, or felt to be oppressive. It will probably require great temper and great management in the new sovereigns to exercise, without offence, the powers with which they are legitimately invested; but their danger will be great indeed, if they suddenly attempt to go beyond them. With temper and circumspection, they may in time establish the solid foundations of a splendid, though limited, throne; if they aspire again to be absolute, the probability is that they will soon cease to reign. The restoration of the old Nobility seems, |