to you shall contain more interesting, as well as more recent and more triumphant, military details.

I must not omit to mention that, in the Church of Bergen-op-Zoom, a tablet of marble, erected by their brother officers, records the names of the brave men who fell in the valorous, but ill-fated attack upon this famous fortress. For them, as for their predecessors who fell at Fontenoy, the imagination of the Briton will long body forth the emblematic forms of Honour and Freedom weeping by their monuments. Once more, farewell, and remember me.

LETTER III.

PAUL TO HIS COUSIN PETER.

Retrospect-Surrender of Paris-Bourbons RestoredEmigrants-Noblesse-Clergy-Liberalists.

THY politics, my dear Peter, are of the right Scottish cast. Thou knowest our old proverbial character of being wise behind the hand. After all, the wisdom which is rather deduced from events than formed upon predictions, is best calculated for a country politician, and smacks of the prudence as well as of the aforesaid proverbial attribute of our national character. Yet, believe me, that though a more strict seclusion of the dethroned Emperor of France might have prevented his debarkment at Cannes, and although we and our allies might have spared the perilous farce of leaving him a globe and sceptre to play withal, there were, within France itself, elements sufficiently jarring to produce, sooner or later, a dreadful explosion. You daily politicians are so little in the practice of recollecting last year's news, that I may be excused recalling some leading facts to your recollection, which will serve as a text to my future lucubrations.

The first surrender of Paris had been preceded by so much doubt, and by so many difficulties, that

the final victory seems to have been a matter not only of exultation, but even of surprise, to the victors themselves. This great event was regarded, rather as a gratification of the most romantic and extravagant expectations, than as a natural consequence of that course of reaction, the ebb of which brought the allies to the gates of Paris, as its tide had carried Bonaparte to those of Berlin and Vienna. Pleased and happy with themselves, and dazzled with the glory of their own exploit, the victors were in no humour to impose harsh conditions upon the vanquished; and the French, on their part, were delighted at their

easy escape from the horrors of war, internal and external, of siege, pillage, and contribution. Bonaparte's government had of late become odious to the bulk of the people, by the pressure of taxation, by the recurring terrors of the proscription, but, above all, by the repeated disasters which the nation had latterly sustained. The constitutional charter, under which the Bourbon family were restored, was not only a valuable gift to those who really desired to be ensured against the re-establishment of despotism, but operated as a salvo to the wounded feelings of the still more numerous class, who wished that the crimes and calamities of the Revolution should not appear to be altogether thrown away, and who could now appeal to this Bill of Rights, as a proof that the French nation had not sinned and suffered in vain. The laboratory and chemical apparatus which were to have produced universal equality of rights, had indeed exploded about the ears of the philosophical experimentalists, yet they con

RETROSPECT-BOURBONS RESTORED.

23

soled themselves with the privileges which had been assured to them by the King upon his restoration.

"So though the Chemist his great secret miss,

For neither it in art or nature is,

Yet things well worth his toil he gains,
And doth his charge and labour pay,

With good unsought, experiments by the way."

All parties being thus disposed to be pleased with themselves, and with each other, the occupation of the capital was considered as the close of the disasters which France had sustained, and converted into a subject of general jubilee, in which the Parisians themselves rejoiced, or affected to rejoice, as loudly as their unbidden guests. But this desirable state of the public mind was soon overcast, and the French, left to their own reflections, began speedily to exhibit symptoms both of division and dissatisfaction.

The first, but not the most formidable of their causes of discontent, arose from the pretensions of the emigrant noblesse and clergy.

At the restoration of Charles II., (to which we almost involuntarily resort as a parallel case,) the nobility and gentry of England, who had espoused the cause of his father, were in a very different condition from the emigrant nobles of France. Many had indeed fallen in battle, and some few by the arbitrary sentence of the usurper's courts of justice; but the majority, although impoverished by fines and sequestrations, still resided upon their patrimonial estates, and exercised over their tenantry and cottagers the rights of proprietors.

Their influence, though circumscribed, was therefore still considerable; and had they been disposed to unite themselves into a party, separate from the other orders of the state, they had power to support the pretensions which they might form. But here the steady sense and candour, not alone of Ormond and Clarendon, but of all the leading Cavaliers, induced them to avoid a line of conduct so tempting yet so perilous. The dangers of reaction, according to the modern phrase, were no sooner sounded into the public ear by the pamphlets and speeches of those who yet clung to a republic, than every purpose, whether of revenge, or of a selfish and separate policy, was disowned in a manifesto, subscribed by the principal Royalists, in which they professed to ascribe their past misfortunes not to any particular class of their fellowcitizens, but to the displeasure of the Almighty, deservedly visiting upon them their own sins and those of the community. Such was the declaration of the Cavaliers at that important crisis; and though there were not wanting royalistes purs et par excellence, who, like Swift's correspondent, Sir Charles Wogan,' censured the conduct of Clarendon for suffering to escape so admirable an opportunity to establish despotic authority in the crown, and vest feudal power in the nobility, I need not waste words in vindicating his moderate and accommodating measures to my discerning friend Peter.

The scattered remnants of the French noblesse, who survived to hail the restoration of the Bour

1 [See Sir Walter Scott's edition of Swift's Works, vol. xvii.]