committed by Lebon and Carrier and Collot d'Herbois, but they acted up. on the same system in the Tyrol. Eager, if possible, to root out the love of liberty from the earth, they took every means to prevent the patriots from escaping into the adjoining countries. All the inhabitants of a parish were made responsible with their lives and property for every attack made upon a French or Bavarian soldier; and any parish harbouring a person who had not delivered in his arms, or delaying to deliver him up to the nearest military post, was to be considered as aiding and abetting rebellion, and punished accordingly. The cowardly malice of these vile slaves extended to the dead as well as the living. They dug up the patriots, who, having fallen in the war, had been buried with national honours, destroyed the inscriptions which had been cut in wood over their graves, and turned their bodies into holes dug in the highway, treating them like thieves and malefactors. Hofer meantime concealed himself in a hut which he had built in a remote part of the mountains, and where, during the winter, while the country was covered with snow, he must have been safe, if, even in the Tyrol, a wretch had not been found base enough to betray him. This shame of his country was a priest, by name How Donay, and he, for a bribe of 200

Feb. 24.

1810.

louis d'ors, guided the French to his hiding place. Hofer was led with his family barefoot through the snow to Botzen, under an escort of 700 men, and exposed to every kind of ill treatment. Such, however, was the indig. nation of the Tyrolese, that the ruffians, who were determined upon the murder of this heroic chieftain, dared not perpetrate it in his own country. They assured the people that his life would be spared, conveyed him to Mantua, and there by the sentence of a military tribunal he was shot. He refused to let his eyes be covered when he was led to execution, and died as became a martyr, rejoicing that he had done his duty. The mean and rancorous Corsican committed a new act of baseness towards his memory; he printed a letter in Hofer's name, addressed to the Tyrolese, in which he was represented as exhorting them to the most loyal submission to their new master, and feeling the utmost repentance for his own guilt in rising in rebellion. The imposition was too gross to be successful. Another falsehood which the French circulated of the same nature was, that the son of Hofer, detesting his father's example, had entered the Bavarian service; whereas, in truth, this brave and unfortunate boy died of the ill treatment which he endured in his captivity.

WHEN the news of the battle of Wagram, and the more fatal armistice which followed it, reached England, an expedition had long been preparing in favour of our continental allies, and was on the point of sailing. Great Britain had never on any occasion sent out so formidable a force. The number of troops employed were above 39,000, and the naval armament consisted of 35 sail of the line, 2 fifty gun ships, 3 of 44 guns, 18 frigates, and 179 smaller vessels, together with a large proportion of such craft as is employed in the dockyards. The military command was given to the Earl of Chatham, the

naval to Sir Richard Strachan. The former appointment excited considerable wonder, for Lord Chatham was a man whose habits of indolence were notoriously inveterate, inso. much, that in the height of his bro ther's power it had been found necessary to remove him from the office of first lord of the Admiralty. His manners were agreeable, and in conversation he displayed talents, which, as they never appeared on other oc

casions, seem only to have been exerted for conversational purposes, or only equal to them. Mr Pitt was known to have described him as a person of useless abilities. He had served on the continent during the anti-jacobin. war, and was third in command at the disgraceful capitul tion of the Helder. At this time he held the situation of master of the ordnance, and in that capacity pos sessed a seat in the cabinet. In the course of the expedition, and still more after its conclusion, some incon venience was found to result from having thus invested a cabinet minister with command.

The objects proposed for this grea armament to accomplish were, "the capture or destruction of the enemy's ships, either building at Antwerp and Flushing, or afloat on the Scheldt; the destruction of the arsenals and dock-yards at Antwerp, Terneus, and Flushing; the reduction of the island of Walcheren, and the rendering, if possible, the Scheldt no longer navigable for ships of war." It had been a favourite scheme of Mr Pitt's

+ Lord Chatham's Instructions.

to take Flushing by a coup-de-main; he consulted Dumouriez upon it, and that general gave it as his opinion that no attack upon Holland would be successful. In 1798, however, Sir Home Popham was ordered to form a plan for attacking this fortress, and Nelson in 1801 had fixed his eye upon the same point. He considered it as a week's expedition for four or five thousand men: upon this Sir John Moore was consulted, and he, who never looked hopefully upon any object, discovered so many obstacles and difficulties, that the design was aban. doned. Buonaparte annexed the town and its port to France in 1807, his brother Louis being ordered to cede it with all the formalities of a treaty. This usurpation, though it added nothing to the actual means of annoyance which he possessed, called the attention of the English government anew to an object which it had already had in contemplation, and Lord Castlereagh spoke of Flushing in parliament as a point against which it be hoved us to be particularly and adequately prepared.* The expedition was planned in March; but, though or 16,000 men were then thought a sufficient force, the commander-inchief could not produce them, on account of the shattered condition of the army after the return of so large a portion of it from Spain. A larger army became necessary when Antwerp was made the ultimate point of attack. Here Buonaparte was carrying on naval works with all the vigour of a newly-established despotism. Fifteen hundred houses, the most ancient part of this great city, were demolished, and the whole space which they occupied was appropriated to slips for ship-building. Ten

15 or

80 gun ships were at that time on the stocks; there was room for building twenty at the same time, and the timber of the Black Forest, which might be floated down the Rhine, is inexhaustible. Mechanics for the work were chosen from among the conscripts, they were formed into military as well as working orders, a company under the superintendance of a captain to each ship, and every Sunday they were exercised as soldiers. Ministers had been informed that this part of the country was now so drained of its troops in conse quence of the war with Austria, that a British army might penetrate to Antwerp without any serious resist

ance.

That short-sighted and selfish system which would direct the efforts of the country to what are called "purely British objects," miserably displayed itself upon this occasion. Had this army been sent to Spain, it would have exterminated the French from the peninsula; had it been sent to the Elbe, the north of Germany was ripe for revolt; Hanover would have joined us, and Prussia might not improbably have made one more struggle to avert its final destruction. Schill might have been saved, had we gone in the right time and to the right place; and the Duke of Bruns wick, with an English force in the country, would have been at the head of an army instead of a handful of fugitives. But at Antwerp and at Flushing there were ships; and it was deemed a British object to destroy the naval resources of the enemy. In the very conception of such a project there was a demonstrable absurdity. Our fleet was already so triumphantly superior, that all com.

petition for the empire of the ocean wasat an end. Nothing remained to be done; these ships which were building in the Scheldt could not be manned during the war, and if manned, we were certain of victory whenever we met them on the seas. The military power of France was greater than ours, though not in a like proportion. What then was the true policy of England?-evidently to bring its navy to co-operate with the army wherever that was possible, in reducing the military strength of our enemy; instead of this, ministers sent an army to co-operate with the fleet in attacking ships. It is worthy of remark also, that of all the persons who were consulted upon this expedition, not one of them seems to have approved it. Colonel Gordon delivered it as his opinion that it would undoubtedly be a desperate enterprize, and that in the attempt a very large proportion of our naval and military means would be put to imminent hazard; and Sir David Dundas, the commander-in-chief, said, that in whatever way Antwerp was to be approached, the service was one of very great risk, and from which the safe return of the army was very precarious. Sir Richard Strachan indeed held the language of hope to those under his command. The armament," he said, " under the Earl of Chatham and himself, yielded to none that ever embarked from England, in its importance both to the interest of the nation, and the credit of those who were entrusted with its direction; and from its extensive and minute combinations, he assured the fleet that no enterprize ever afforded a fairer scope for zeal and ability to all the individuals honoured with a share in it." Yet it appears that Ad. miral Strachan augured less confi

dently of success than he spoke, and that he never thoroughly approved the plan of the expedition. He was of opinion that ships of the line could go above Antwerp, (as was the fact,) and therefore, unless Antwerp were taken, that it would be difficult, or ra ther impossible, to destroy them. No person seems to have perceived the comparative insignificance of the end proposed, nor to have once taken into the account the worst danger which threatened the armament, the known, calculable, and certain consequences of sending an army to the most unwholesome part of the habitable earth, (Batavia itself scarcely excepted,) and precisely in the midst of the sickly months.

Aware that this great armament was preparing, and ignorant of its destination, the French expected its arrival upon some part of their usurp ed and almost defenceless empire with considerable apprehensions; for Buonaparte, calculating more reasonably on the incapacity of his opponents than upon his own fortune, had drained France and Flanders of their troops that he might crush the house of Austria by a decisive blow. If England had, like him, been ambi tious of nothing but glory, and careless of the destruction committed in obtaining it, we might have marched to Paris, and have burnt his capital to the ground. But it was in the Low Countries that our appear. ance was dreaded. There were not an hundred soldiers at Ostend, or Bruges, or Ghent, and the French functionaries were so alarmed by the consciousness of their own defenceless situation, that they sent their families into the interior. Many of the conscripts who had been recently raised in those provinces fled, and concealed themselves, in hope of joining the