2

adopted the other alternative which in Cato has been so lauded in the schools and universities of Christianity, and held up to ingenuous youth as a bright example of heroism? Assuredly not. Cato belonged to a school of philosophy which affected to view with indifference all the calamities of life, and yet took it himself away, to avoid the clemency of a generous conqueror; he was not true to his own principles, and, besides that he was a most tyrannical and intolerable personage, deserves all the opprobrium of a cowardly recreant. Napoleon cannot be said to have had any principles at all bearing particularly upon the subject; and with a pride at least equal to Cato's, he might have spurned to fall alive into an inveterate enemy's power. Still, in truth, the cast of Napoleon's mind was religious, and it was impossible that, with a comprehension so expanded as his, it should be otherwise: at times the devotional feeling was strong upon him, but without reference to any particular creed. Thus, whilst adhering outwardly to the faith of the Church of Rome, he partook rather the spirit of the Mohammedans, and acknowledging the all-ruling providence of a Deity, believed implicitly in the doctrine of predestination. Hence he was led more easily to resign himself to his lot, and to discard the idea of adopting violent means to avert it. It is true that at Fontainebleau in 1814 he made a serious attempt to poison himself, and was with some difficulty rescued from death; and that in the year following he at different times talked of committing suicide, but rather in the manner of a menace than with any decided intention of resorting to such an extremity. Upon the whole, whatever impressions might have been upon his mind to restrain him from raising a guilty hand against his own life-whether they arose from fortitude of resolution, from fatalist resignation, or from higher convictions-it is fortunate, for the sake of his terrible example, which might have otherwise lost half its moral, that they operated effectually with him, and reserved him for a living tomb, to pine away many days in sorrow, tribulation, and repentance.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE-MODIFICATIONS IN THE CHARTER-THE LEGISLATURES OF 1815, 16, 17, AND 18-THE KING AND HIS COURT

CONGRESS OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE-EVACUATION OF THE FRENCH TERRITORY BY THE ALLIED ARMIES-1815 TO 1818.

The subversion of the French Empire operated with more or less effect upon the situation of every other power in Europe. In the year 1813, when the sovereigns of Russia and Germany sought to stimulate populations to patriotic exertions, they proclaimed the great objects of the war to be on their part the enfranchisement of nations, the reparation of wrongs, and the restitution of territories to their ancient possessors. They still reiterated these pompous professions in 1815, when startled from their work of adjustment at Vienna by the intelligence of Napoleon's landing, although in reality they had already commenced to set them at nought, and were almost on the point of coming to blows among themselves touching the appropriation of sundry rich spoils they held to be at their disposition. From this inglorious strife they were saved only by the common dread and horror they entertained of their old taskmaster, which again united them in bonds of amity and union. They marched against him, and covered France with their armies; in conjunction with England, they conquered him and expelled him from Europe; and thus they became truly the supreme arbiters of the whole continent. This was an extraordinary change for them, especially for the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia, who had been so long the slaves of the crushed Emperor, and had been accustomed to receive the law from him as his obedient vassals. It was sufficient perhaps to intoxicate wiser heads than theirs, and make them forget all the salutary lessons they had learnt by the events of the Revolution; certainly it effectually turned theirs, and revived in them all those notions of the olden time which had passed into exploded traditions, and reawakened in them the rapacity which had been the primitive cause of their earlier ruin. England was not at all backward in embracing the same views, although she was in appearance a little more disinterested; and the four leading States being agreed, they proceeded very composedly to parcel out as it seemed meet to them the different communities of Europe, precisely as Napoleon had done before them, and precisely after the manner for which they had so severely upbraided him. Thus it is that power corrupts the human heart, whether beating in the

breast of a long-descended monarch claiming to reign by the grace of God,' or in that of a plebeian upstart who asserts the mastery of the naked sword. With the reminiscences of the last twenty years fresh on their minds, these inflated potentates acted as if no such drama had passed before their eyes-as if populations were to be transferred like chattels bestial-as if the liberties of nations were dependent simply on the pleasure of rulersas if, in short, the eighteenth century had not existed, and the palmy days of feudalism were still in the ascendant!

On the 9th of June 1815 was finally elaborated the famous act of the Congress of Vienna, which for many succeeding years regulated the position of the several European powers, and rearranged the territorial dislocations which had resulted from the conquests and creations of Napoleon. The main principle upon which it proceeded was, that all who had suffered grievously from France, or assisted materially to subdue her, should be largely indemnified and rewarded; whilst all, on the contrary, who had been benefited by her, and adhered faithfully to her alliance, should be despoiled and punished. In this latter category, of all the members of the Confederation of the Rhine the king of Saxony alone stood ranked, the others by a timely defection having won condonation. Upon him, accordingly, the anger of the Allies fell with revengeful force. After the battle of Leipzig he had been made a prisoner in his palace, and carried off to Berlin, whence he was removed to the castle of Friedrichsfeld, and there detained in confinement. Prussia, ever the most greedy of powers, claimed the cession of all his territories, and was supported by Alexander in her demand. It was opposed, however, by Austria and England; and finally Prussia was brought to be content with one-third of Saxony, which was extorted from the captive king as the price of his restoration to the remainder. Thus about 1,000,000 of Saxons, who had ever been warmly attached to their reigning family, and united in the closest ties with their countrymen, were ruthlessly severed from old connections, and handed over to this insatiable House of Brandenburg, whose princes had been engaged for a century in the constant practice of pilfering from their neighbours. Other 250,000 of them were in like manner transferred to the king of England, whose old electorate of Hanover was swelled by this and other acquisitions into the dimensions of a petty kingdom.

The fidelity of the king of Saxony being thus effectually chastised, the next monarch upon whom the vengeance of the Congress fell was the king of Denmark. This unfortunate prince had been forced into an alliance with Napoleon from his natural resentment against England for her seizure of his navy in 1807; and having adhered to his cause even after the tide of adversity set in against him, became amenable to punishment according to

the new code of the Allies. It was convenient also to inflict it, since, so far back as 1812, Bernadotte had been promised by Russia and England the possession of Norway in return for his withdrawing Sweden from the alliance with Napoleon; and this reward he loudly claimed on the additional strength of his more recent services. The king of Denmark accordingly was compelled to cede his ancient patrimony of Norway to Sweden, receiving, however, in exchange the detached province of Pomerania in Germany. The Norwegians, nevertheless, refused to be thus summarily disposed of, and prepared to resist this odious annexation. They offered the crown of Norway to Prince Christian of Denmark, and boldly proclaimed their independence. But their resistance was scarcely equal to this heroic front, and Bernadotte having invaded their country with an army of 20,000 men, soon reduced it to submission. A liberal constitution, analogous to that of Sweden, was given to it, however, and the union of the two countries was cemented on a basis leaving each independent of the other. As to the compensation of the king of Denmark, Pomerania was almost valueless to him, from its isolation from the rest of his dominions, and he willingly consented to gratify the all-absorbing lust of Prussia, by resigning it to her on condition of receiving in exchange the petty duchy of Lauenburg, which, again, had been severed from the new kingdom of Hanover. Such were the choppings and changes these monarchs made among populations, carving them off like joints of meat, and casting fragments about in merry and careless disport.

Truly these were halcyon days for potentates, such as it is probable they will not again enjoy. The emperor of Russia, who made great professions of disinterestedness and magnanimity, laid claim to the whole duchy of Warsaw as it had been constituted by Napoleon, but eventually agreed to give the duchy of Posen to Prussia, with the course of the Vistula from Thorn to Danzig, and the districts of Gallicia to Austria, which had formerly belonged to her, setting up, moreover, the city of Cracow as a sort of independent republic, the last insignificant shadow of Polish nationality. The provinces which thus fell to him he proposed to erect into a kingdom separate from the crown of Russia, and to be governed upon something approaching to constitutional principles; that is to say, an approximation to the constitution of May 1791, which had been so perfidiously subverted by his grandmother and the father of the king of Prussia. It was certainly one of the phenomena of this extraordinary period, that an autocrat of the Russias should have been the most earnestly-disposed of all the monarchs to establish constitutional liberty in countries fitted to receive it; and that he would have given free institutions to Russia itself, if its inhabitants had been capable of accepting them. Such at least was his disposition at the present period,

when he still retained some of the generous emotions of his youth; but it was a heresy in the monarchical creed, of which he was soon weeded. Thus taking into account the immense acquisitions wrung from Turkey and Persia, the appropriation of Finland, and the annexation of nearly the whole of Poland, the Russian empire received an enormous aggrandisement at the close of the revolutionary war, and more than ever towered in colossal might above the States of its neighbours.

In the race of competition for spoils, Austria was neither the most backward nor the most modest. It was only natural that she should resume the Tyrol, and other provinces which Napoleon had taken from her and given to Bavaria. These she had taken, indeed, in 1813 by a separate convention with Bavaria, to whom she promised an adequate indemnity at the general peace, to be derived of course from the territories of others. But with these she was very far from being content, and aspired to obtain the whole of northern Italy in addition. Thus was seen how readily her appetite increased with the prospect of having it satisfied; for if Napoleon would have consented to restore to her the Illyrian provinces of Venice in 1813, she had offered to remain neutral, or even to join him with a contingent of forces. Now she would have not only Illyria and all Venice, but she would push her frontier to the western shore, and swamp both Piedmont and Genoa. But the whole of this audacious pretension was not allowed, and she was obliged to content herself with Lombardy and Venice, together with the valleys of the Valteline, the Bormio, and Chiavenna. The iniquity of the first seizure of Venice in 1797, under the agreement with Napoleon, was held to be covered by the lapse of time, and no compunction was felt at consummating its renewed absorption. Thus the Austrian empire likewise, after all its reverses, after all its immense concessions by the treaties of Lunéville, Presburg, and Vienna (1801, 1805, and 1809), in the end not only recovered the whole of her losses, but gained a large increase of territory and influence, especially in Italy, where she henceforth exercised an overshadowing prepon

derance.

But after all, it was certainly Prussia who contrived to gain the greatest extent of territorial enlargement. To the north she was doubtless somewhat curtailed by the loss of Warsaw, but for that she was richly remunerated by her acquisitions in Saxony and Pomerania. In addition, she got considerable portions of Westphalia and Franconia, extending by the former to the Rhine and beyond it, stretching to the east of that river for a space of seventy-five leagues. By her increase of territory and of population, which was swelled to upwards of 11,000,000, she became, what she had never been so completely before, a first-rate power, and obtained an enormous addition of real strength and impor