during ten years, an army of one hundred thousand men; and could it then have been worse situated than it has been since, and is still at this moment?

But the manner of extorting, and the individuals employed to extort, were more humiliating to its dignity and independence, than the extortions themselves were injurious to its resources. The first revolutionary ambassador Buonaparte sent thither evinced both his ingratitude and his contempt.

Few of our many upstart generals have more illiberal sentiments, and more vulgar and insolent manners than General Lasnes. The son of a publican and a smuggler, he was a smuggler himself in his youth, and afterwards a postilion, a dragoon, a deserter, a coiner, a jacobin, a terrorist; and he has, with the meanness and brutality of these different trades, a kind of native impertinence and audacity which shocks and disgusts. He seems to say I am a villain; I know that I am so; and I am proud of being so. To obtain the rank I possess, I have respected no human laws, and I bid defiance to all divine vengeance. I might be murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me. On a gibbet, or in the palace of a prince-seized by the executioner, or dining with sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must always remain the same. Infamy cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me. General, ambassador, fieldmarshal, first consul, or emperor, Lasnes will always be the same polluted but daring individual; a stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour and virtue. Where Buonaparte sends a bandit of such a stamp, he has resolved on destruction. A kind of temporary disgrace was said to have occasioned Lasnes' first mission to Portugal. When commander of the consular guard, in 1802, he had appropriated to himself a sum of money from the regimental chest, and, as a punishment, was exiled as an ambassador, as he said himself. His resentment against Buonaparte he took care to pour out on the Regent of Portugal, without inquiring or caring about the etiquette of the Court of the Thuilleries with him, and determined to fraternize 'with a foreign and legitimate sovereign, as he had done with his own sans-culotte friend and First Consul; and, what is more surprising, he carried his point. The Prince Regent not only admitted him to the royal table, but stood sponsor to his child

by a wife, who had been two years his mistress, before he was divorced from his first spouse, and with whom the Prince's consort, a Bourbon Princess, and a daughter of a King, was also obliged to associate.

Avaricious as well as unprincipled, he pursued, as an ambassador, his former business of a smuggler, and instead of being ashamed of a discovery, proclaimed it publicly, deserted his post, was not reprimanded in France, but was, without apology, received back again in Portugal. His conduct afterwards could not be surprising. He only insisted that some faithful and able ministers should be removed, and others appointed in their place, more complaisant, and less honest.

New plans of Buonaparte, however, delivered Portugal from this plague; but what did it obtain in return? Another grenadier ambassador, less brutal, but more cunning; as abandoned, but more dissimulating.

General Junot is the son of a corn-chandler, near the cornmarket of this capital, and was a shopman to his father in 1789. Having committed some pilfering, he was turned out of the pa> rental dwelling, and therefore lodged himself as an inmate of the Jacobin Club. In 1792, he entered as a soldier in a regiment of the army marching against the county of Nice; and in 1793, he served before Toulon, where he became acquainted with Buonaparte, whom he, in January, 1794, assisted in dispatching the unfortunate Toulonese; and with whom also, in the autumn of the same year, he therefore was arrested as a terrorist.

In 1799, when commander in chief, Buonaparte made Junot his aid-de-camp; and in that capacity he accompanied him, in 1798, to Egypt. There, as well as in Italy, he fought bravely, but had no particular opportunity of distinguishing himself. He was not one of those select few, whom Napoleone brought with him to Europe, in 1799, but returned first to France in 1801, when he was nominated a general of division, and commander of this capital; a place he resigned last year to General Murat.

His despotic and cruel behaviour, while commander of Paris, made him not much regretted. Fouché lost in him, indeed, an able support, but none of us here ever experienced from him jus→ tice, much less protection. As with all other of our modern public functionaries, without money nothing was obtained from

him. It required as much for not doing any harm, as if, in renouncing his usual vexatious oppressions, he had conferred benefits. He was much suspected of being, with Fouché, the patron of a gang of street-robbers and house-breakers, who, in the winter of 1803, infested this capital, and who, when finally discovered, were screened from justice, and suffered to escape punishment.

I will tell you what I personally have seen of him. Happening one evening to enter the rooms at Frescati, where the gambling tables are kept, I observed him undressed, out of regimentals, in company with a young man, who afterwards avowed himself an aid-de-camp of this general, and who was playing with rouleaux of Louis d'ors, supposed to contain fity each, at Rouge et Noir. As long as he lost any, which he did several, he took up the rouleaux on the table, and gave another from his pocket. At last he won, when he asked the bankers to look at their loss, and count the money in his rouleaux before they paid him. On opening it, they found it contained one hundred bank notes, of one hundred thousand livres each, (45007.) folded in a manner to resemble the form and size of Louis d'ors. The bankers refused to pay, and applied to the company, whether they were not right to do so, after so many rouleaux had been changed by the person who now required such an unusual sum in such an unusual manner. Before any answer could be given, Junot interfered, asking the bankers whether they knew who he was. Upon their answering in the negative, he said, “I am General Junot, the commander of Paris; and this officer who has won the money is my aid-de-camp, and I insist upon your paying him this instant, if you do not wish to have your bank confiscated, and your persons arrested." They refused to part with money which they protested was not their own; and most of the individuals present joined them in their resistance. "You are altogether a set of scoundrels and sharpers," interrupted Junot, 66 your business shall soon be done." So saying, he seized all the money on the table; and a kind of boxing match ensued between him and the bankers, in which he, being a tall and strong man, got the better of them. The tumult, however, brought in the guard, whom he ordered, as their chief, to carry to prison sixteen persons he pointed out; fortunately I was not of the number; I say fortunately, for I heard that most of them remained

A a

imprisoned six months, before this delicate affair was cleared up and settled. In the mean time Junot not only pocketed all the money he pretended was due to his aid-de-camp, but the whole sum contained in the bank, which was double the amount. It was believed, by every one present, that this was an affair arranged between him and his aid-de-camp beforehand, to pillage the bank. What a commander, what a general, and what an ambassador !

Fitte, the secretary of our embassy to Portugal, was formerly an abbé, and must be well remembered in your country, where he passed some years as an emigrant, but was, in fact, a spy of Talleyrand. I am told, that by his intrigues, he even succeeded to swindle your ministers out of a sum of money, by some plausible schemes he proposed to them. He is, as well as all other apostate priests, a very dangerous man, and an immoral and unprincipled wretch. During the time of Robespierre, he is said to have caused the murder of his elder brother and younger sister; the former he denounced, to appropriate to himself his wealth; and the latter he accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him. He daily boasts of the great protection and great friendship of Talleyrand. Qualis rex, talis, grex.

LETTER LIX.

MY LORD,

Paris, September, 1805.

IN some of the ancient republics, all citizens, who, in time of danger and trouble, remained neutral, were punished as traitors, or treated as enemies. When, by our Revolution, civilized society and the European commonwealth were menaced with a total overthrow, had each member of it been considered in the same light, and subjected to the same laws, some individual states might perhaps have been less wealthy, but the whole community would have been more happy and more tranquil, which would have been much better. It was a great error in the powerful league of 1793, to admit any neutrality at all; every government that did not combat rebellion should have been considered and treated as its ally. The man who continues neutral, though only a passenger, when hands are wanted to preserve the vessel from

sinking, deserves to be thrown overboard, to be swallowed up by the waves, and to perish the first. Had all other nations been united and unanimous, during 1793 and 1794, against the monster Jacobinism, we should not have heard of either jacobin Directors, jacobin Consuls, or a jacobin Emperor. But then, from a petty regard to a temporary profit, they entered into a truce with a revolutionary volcano, which, sooner or later, will consume them all; for I am afraid that it is now too late for all human power, with all human means, to preserve any state, any government, or any people, from suffering by the threatening conflagration. Switzerland, Venice, Geneva, Genoa, and Tuscany, have already gathered the poisoned fruits of their neutrality. Let but Buonaparte establish himself undisturbed in Hanover some years longer, and you will see the neutral Hanse Towns, neutral Prussia, and neutral Denmark, visited with all the evils of invasion, pillage, and destruction, and the independence of the nations in the north will be buried in the rubbish of the liberties of the people of the south of Europe.

These ideas have frequently occurred to me, on hearing our agents pronounce, and their dupes repeat, 'Oh ! the wise government of Denmark! Oh what a wise statesman the Danish minister, Count Bernstorf is!' I do not deny that the late Couni Bernstorf was a great politician; but I assert also that his was a greatness more calculated for regular times than for periods of unusual political convulsion; like your Pitt, the Russian Woronzow, and the Austrian Colloredo, he was too honest to judge soundly, and to act rightly, according to the present situation of affairs; he adhered too much to the old routine, and did not perceive the immense difference between the government of a revolutionary ruler and the government of a Louis XIII. or a Louis XIV. I am certain, had he still been alive, he would have repented of his errors, and tried to have repaired them.

His son, the present Danish minister, follows his father's plans, and adheres, in 1805, to a system laid down by him in 1795; while the alterations that have occurred within these ten years have more affected the real and relative power and weakness of states, than all the revolutions which have been produced by the insurrections, wars, and pacifications of the two preceding centuries. He has even gone farther, in some parts of his administra