the Congress of Radstadt was not his place !—and this was true ¿ for what can be common between honour and infamy, between virtue and vice? On his return to Sweden, Count de Fersen was rewarded with the dignity of a grand officer of state. Of another faithful and trusty counsellor of his Swedish Majesty, Baron d'Armfeldt, a panegyric would be pronounced, in saying that he was the friend of Gustavus III. From a page to that chevalier of royalty, he was advanced to the rank of general; and during the war with Russia, in 1789 and 1790, he fought and bled by the side of his prince and benefactor. It was to him that his King said, when wounded mortally, by the hand of a regicide, at a masquerade, in March, 1792, "Don't be alarmed, my friend! You know as well as myself, that all wounds are not dangerous." Unfortunately his were not of that description. In the will of this great monarch, Baron d'Armfeldt was nominated one of the guardians of his present sovereign, and a governor of the capital; but the Duke Regent, who was a weak prince, guided by philosophical adventurers, by illuminati and free-masons, most of whom had imbibed French revolutionary maxims, sent him, in a kind of honourable exile, as an ambassador to Italy. Shortly afterwards, under pretence of having discovered a conspiracy, in which the Baron was implicated, he was outlawed; he then took refuge in Russia, where he was made a general, and as such distinguished himself under Suwarrow, during the campaign of 1799. He was then recalled to his country, and restored to all his former places and dignities, and has never since ceased to merit and obtain the favour, friendship, and approbation of his King. He is said to be one of the Swedish general officers intended to serve in union with the Russian troops expected in Pomerania. Wherever he is employed, I am convinced that he will fight, vanquish, or perish like a hero. Last spring he was offered the place of a lieutenant-general in the Austrian service, which, with regard to salary and emoluments, is greatly superior to what he enjoys in Sweden; he declined it, however; because, with a warrior of his stamp, interest is the last consideration. MY LORD, LETTER LV. Paris, September, 1805. BELIEVE me, Buonaparte dreads more the liberty of the press, than all other engines, military or political, used by his rivals or foes for his destruction. He is aware of the fatal consequences all former factions suffered from the public exposure of past crimes and future views; of the reality of their guilt, and of the fallacy of their boasts and promises. He does not doubt, but that a faithful account of all the actions and intrigues of his government, its imposition, fraud, duplicity, and tyranny, would make a sensible alteration in the public opinion; and that even those who, from motives of patriotism, from being tired of our revolutionary convulsions, or wishing for tranquillity, have been his adherents, might alter their sentiments, when they read of enormities which must indicate insecurity, and prove to every one, that he who waded through rivers of blood to seize power, will never hesitate about the means of preserving it. There is not a printing office, from the banks of the Elbe to the gulf of Naples, which is not under the direct or indirect inspection of our police agents; and not a bookseller in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, or Switzerland, publishes a work, which, if contrary to our policy or our fears, is not either confiscated or purchased on the day it makes its appearance. Besides our regular emissaries, we have persons travelling from the beginning to the end of the year, to pick up information of what literary productions are printing; of what authors are popular, of their political opinions, and private circumstances.This branch of our haute police extends even to your country. Before the revolution, we had in this capital only two daily papers, but from 1789 to 1799, never less than thirty, and frequently sixty journals were daily printed. After Buonaparte had assumed the Consular authority, they were reduced to ten. But though these were under a very strict inspection of our minister of police, they were regarded still as too numerous, and have lately been diminished to eight, by the incorporation of Le Clef du Cabinet, and Le Bulletin de l'Europe, with Gazette de France, a paper of which the infamously famous Barrere is the editor. According to a proposal of Buonaparte, it was lately de bated in the council of state, whether it would not be politic to suppress all daily prints, with the sole exception of the Moniteur. Fouche and Talleyrand spoke much in favour of this measure of security. Real, however, is said to have suggested another plan, which was adopted; and our government, instead of prohibiting the appearance of our daily papers, has resolved by degrees to purchase them all, and entrust them entirely to the direction of Barrere, who is now consulted in every thing, concerning books or newspapers. All circulation of foreign papers is prohibited, until they have previously obtained the stamp of approbation from the grand literary censor, Barrere. Any person offending against this law, is most severely punished. An American gentleman by the name of Campbell, was last spring sent to the Temple, for lending one of your old daily papers to a person who lodged in the same hotel with him. After an imprisonment of ten weeks, he made some pecuniary sacrifices to obtain his liberty; but was carried to Havre, under an escort of gens-d'armes, put on board a neutral vessel, and forbade, under pain of death, ever to set his foot on French ground again. An American vessel was, about the same time, confiscated at Bourdeaux, and the captain and crew imprisoned, because some English books were found on board, in which Buonaparte, Talleyrand, Fouche, and some of our great men, were rather ill treated. The crew has since been liberated, but the captain has been brought here, and is still in the Temple. The vessel and cargo has been sold as lawful captures, though the captain has proved, from the name written in the books, that they belonged to a passenger. A young German student in surgery, who came here to improve himself, has been nine months in the same state prison, for having with him a book printed in Germany, during Buonaparte's expedition to Egypt, wherein the chief and the undertaking are ridiculed. His mother, the widow of a clergyman, hearing of the misfortune of her son, came here, and has presented to the Emperor and Empress, half a dozen petitions, without any effect whatever, and has almost ruined herself and her other children, by the expenses of the journey. During a stay of four months, she has not yet been able to gain admittance into the Temple, to visit or see her son ; who, perhaps, expired in tortures, or died broken hearted, before she came here, A dozen copies of a funeral sermon on the duke d'Enghien had found their way here, and were secretly circulated for some time; but at last the police heard of it, and every person who was suspected of having read them was arrested. The number of these unfortunate persons, according to some, amounted to one hundred and thirty, while others say, that they were only eightyfour, of whom twelve died suddenly in the Temple, and the remainder were transported to Cayenne; upwards of half of them were women, some of the ci-devant highest rank among subjects. A Prussian of the name of Bulow, was shot as a spy in the camp of Boulogne, because in his trunk was an English book, with the lives of Buonaparte and of some of his generals. Every day, such and other examples of the severity of our government are related; and foreigners who visit us continue nevertheless to be off their guard. They would be less punished had they with them forged bills, rather than printed books or newspapers, in which our Imperial Family, and public functionaries, are not treated with due respect. Buonaparte is convinced that in every book where he is not spoken of with praise, the intent is to blame him; and such intents or negative guilt, never escape with impunity. As, notwithstanding the endeavours of our government, we are more fond of foreign prints, and have more confidence in them than in our own, official presses have lately been established at Antwerp, at Cologne, and at Mentz, where the Gazette de Leyden, Hamburgh Correspondenten, and Journal de Frankfort, are reprinted, some articles left out, and others inserted in their room. It was intended to reprint also the Courier de Londres, but our types, and particularly our paper, would detect the fraud. I have read one of our own Journal de Frankfort, in which were extracts from this French paper, printed in your country, which I strongly suspect are of our own manufactory. I am told that several new books, written by foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant government, are now in the presses of those of our frontier towns, and will soon be laid before the public as foreign productions. A clerk of a banking-house had lately the impudence to mention, during his dinner at the restaurateur's of Cadron Vert, on the Boulevards, some doubt of the veracity of an official article in the Moniteur. As he left the house he was arrested, carried before Fouche, accused of being an English agent, and before supper-time, he was on the road to Rochefort, on his way to Cayenne. As soon as the banker Tournon was informed of this expeditious justice, as it is called here, he waited on Fouche, who threatened even to transport him, if he dared to interfere with the transactions of the police. This banker was himself seized in the spring last year, by a police agent, and gens-d'armes, and carried into exile, forty leagues from this capital, where he remained six months, untila pecuniary douceur procured him a recal. His crime was the having inquired after General Moreau when in the temple, and of having left his card there. LETTER LVI. MY LORD, Paris, September, 1805. THE Prince of Borghese has lately been appointed a captain of the Imperial guard of his Imperial brother-in-law, Napoleone the First, and is now in Germany, making his first campaign. A descendant of a wealthy and ancient Roman family, but born with a weak understanding, he was easily deluded into the rank of the Revolutionists of his own country, by a Parisian Abbe, his instructor and governor, and the gallant of the Princess Borghese his mother. He was the first secretary of the first jacobin club established at Rome, in the spring 1798; and in December the same year when the Neapolitan troops invaded the Ecclesiastical States, he, with his present brother-in-law, another hopeful Roman Prince, Santa Cruce, headed the Roman sans-culottes in their retreat. To show his love of equality, he had previously served as a common man in a company, of which the captain was a fellow that sold cat's-meat and tripe in the streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a scullion of his mother's kitchen. Since Imperial aristocracy is now become the order of the day, he is as insupportable for his pride and vanity, as he some years ago was contemptible for his meanness. He married, in 1803, Madame Le Clerc, who between the death of a first and a wedding with a second husband, a space of twelve months, had twice been in a fair way to become a mother. Her portion was estimated at |