soldiery generally. There never was an army in whose ranks intelligence so largely abounded; nor in which so many officers of the highest rank had originally carried a musket.

The taxation rendered necessary by the constant wars of Napoleon was great; and the utter destruction of the foreign commerce and marine of France, which the naval supremacy of England effected, made the burden the more intolerable for various important classes of the community. On the other hand, the taxes were levied fairly on the whole population, which presented a blessed contrast to the system of the old regime; and the vast extension and improvement of agriculture consequent on the division of the great estates at the revolution, enabled the nation at large to meet the calls of the government with much less difficulty than could have been anticipated at any former period of French history. Napoleon's great public works, too, though undertaken chiefly for the purpose of gratifying his own vanity and that of the nation, could not be executed without furnishing subsistence to vast bodies of the labouring poor, and were thus serviceable to more important ends. From his vain attempts to supply the want of English manufactured goods and colonial produce, by new establishments and inventions (such especially as that of manufacturing a substitute for sugar out of beet root), partial good, in like manner, resulted.

The evils of the conscription, of a heavy taxation, of an inquisitorial police, and of a totally enslaved press-these, and all other evils attendant on this elaborate system of military despotism, were endured for so many years chiefly in consequence of the skill with which Napoleon, according to his own favourite language, knew "to play on the imagination," and gratify the vanity of the French people. In the splendour of his victories, in the magnificence of his roads, bridges, aqueducts, and VOL. II.-D

other monuments, in the general pre-eminence to which the nation seemed to be raised through the genius of its chief, compensation was found for all financial burdens, consolation for domestic calamities, and an equivalent for that liberty in whose name the tyrant had achieved his first glories. But it must not be omitted that Napoleon in every department of his government, made it his first rule to employ the men best fitted, in his mind, to do honour to his service by their talents and diligence; and that he thus attached to himself, throughout the whole of his empire, as well as in his army, the hopes and the influence of those whose personal voices were most likely to control the opinions of society.

He gratified the French nation by adorning the capital, and by displaying in the Tuilleries a court as elaborately magnificent as that of Louis XIV. himself. The old nobility, returning from their exile, mingled in those proud halls with the heroes of the revolutionary campaigns; and over all the ceremonials of these stately festivities Josephine presided with the grace and elegance of one born to be a queen. In the midst of the pomp and splendour of a court, in whose antechambers kings jostled each other, Napoleon himself preserved the plain and unadorned simplicity of his original dress and manners. The great emperor continued throughout to labour more diligently than any subaltern in office. He devoted himself wholly to the ambition to which he compelled all others to contribute.

Napoleon, as emperor, had little time for social pleasures. His personal friends were few: his days were given to labour, and his nights to study. If he was not with his army in the field, he traversed the provinces, examining with his own eyes into the minutest details of local arrangement; and even from the centre of his camp he was continually issuing edicts which showed the accuracy of his obser

vation during these journeys, and his anxiety to premote by any means, consistent with his great purpose, the welfare of some French district, town, or even village.

The manners of the court were at least decent. Napoleon occasionally indulged himself in amours, unworthy of his character and tormenting to his wife; but he never suffered any other female to possess influence over his mind; nor insulted public opinion by any approach to that system of unveiled debauchery which had, during whole ages, disgraced the Bourbon court, and undermined their throne.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Relations of Napoleon with Spain-Treaty of Fontainebleau-Junot marches to Portugal-Flight of the Braganzas to Brazil-French Troops proceed into Spain-Dissensions in the Court-Both Parties appeal to Napoleon-Murat occupies Madrid-Charles and Ferdinand abdicate at Bayonne-Joseph Buonaparte erowned King of Spain.

AFTER the ratification of the treaty of Tilsit, Napoleon, returning as we have seen to Paris, devoted all his energies to the perfect establishment of "the continental system." Something has already been said as to the difficulties which this attempt involved: in truth, it was a contest between the despotic will of Buonaparte, and the interests and habits, not only of every sovereign in his alliance, but of every private individual on the continent; and it was therefore actually impossible that the imperial policy should not be baffled. The Russian government was never, probably, friendly to a system which, from the nature of the national produce and resources, must, if persisted in for any considerable

time, have inflicted irreparable injury on the finances of the landholders, reduced the public establishments, and sunk the effective power of the state. In that quarter, therefore, Napoleon soon found that, notwithstanding all the professions of personal devotion which the young czar continued, perhaps sincerely, to make, his favourite scheme was systematically violated: but the distance and strength of Russia prevented him from, for the present, pushing his complaints to extremity. The Spanish peninsula lay nearer him, and the vast extent to which the prohibited manufactures and colonial produce of England found their way into every district of that country, and especially of Portugal, and thence, through the hands of whole legions of audacious smugglers, into France itself, ere long fixed his attention and resentment. In truth, a proclamation issued at Madrid shortly before the battle of Jena, and suddenly recalled on the intelligence of that great victory, had prepared the emperor to regard with keen suspicion the conduct of the Spanish court, and to trace every violation of his system to its deliberate and hostile connivance.

This court presented in itself the lively image of a divided and degraded nation. The king, old and almost incredibly imbecile, was ruled absolutely by his queen, a woman audaciously unprincipled, whose strong and wicked passions again were entirely under the influence of Manual Godoy, "Prince of the Peace," raised, by her guilty love, from the station of a private guardsman to precedence above all the grandees of Spain, a matrimonial connexion with the royal house, and the supreme conduct of affairs. She, her paramour, and the degraded king were held in contempt and hatred by a powerful party, at the head of whom were the canon Escoiquiz, the duke del Infantado, and Ferdinand, prince of Asturias, heir of the throne. The scenes of dissension which filled the palace and court were scan

dalous beyond all contemporary example; and the strength of the two parties vibrating in the scale, according as corrupt calculators looked to the extent of Godoy's present power, or to the probability of Ferdinand's accession, the eyes of both were turned to the hazardous facility of striking a balance by calling in support from the Tuilleries. Napoleon, or his part, regarding the rival factions with equal scorn, flattered himself that, in their common fears and baseness, he should find the means of ultimately reducing the whole peninsula to complete submission under his own yoke.

The secret history of the intrigues of 1807, between the French court and the rival parties in Spain, has not yet been clearly exposed; nor is it likely to be so while most of the chief agents survive. According to Napoleon, the first proposal for conquering Portugal by the united arms of France and Spain, and dividing that monarchy into three separate prizes, of which one should fall to the disposition of France, a second to the Spanish king, and a third reward the personal exertions of Godoy, came not from him, but from the Spanish minister. It was unlikely that Napoleon should have given any other account of the matter. The suggestion has been attributed, by every Spanish authority, to the emperor; and it is difficult to doubt that such was the fact. The treaty, in which the unprincipled design took complete form, was ratified at Fontainebleau on the 29th October, 1807, and accompanied by a convention, which provided for the immediate invasion of Portugal by a force of 28,000 French soldiers, under the orders of Junot, and of 27,000 Spaniards; while a reserve of 40,000 French troops were to be assembled at Bayonne, ready to take the field by the end of November, in case England should land an army for the defence of Portugal, or the people of that devoted country presume to meet Junot by a national insurrection.