which the Netherlanders were transferred to the house of Nassau, are the only evidences that put you in mind of the new monarchy. If you mention the king, they ask you whether you allude to the old Prince, or to Louis XVIII. His majesty is very kind and condescending :-he received a ball from the citizens' wives the other day, and honoured a puppet show, I speak literally, with his presence. Yesterday he was at the theatre: it was ill-lighted, and worse attended; not a person of apparent gentility was present, to greet the new sovereign. Some thirty stood up in the pit when he entered; but when the play closed, every body moved off without ceremony, not waiting for his majesty's exit. The royal box was surmounted with a paper crown, like that of Shakspeare's Duke of York, which those in the upper lodge looked as if inclined to clip; and the tongues of the lions, supporters of the arms, seemed contrived by the artist to loll out at the bauble above, with an air of archness not justified by heraldry or loyalty. To an eye accustomed to the substantial shows of English royalty, the state of the Dutch monarch cannot but appear most pitiful; and connected with the very general notion, that, such as it is, it will dissolve at the first thunder of the French cannon, nothing can be less enviable than the condition of William the First-ridiculous as Bubb Doddington on his late peerage-a young king, but an old man,

I have not heard it even surmised that the Belgian troops will stand true to their allies, in case the French should be fortunate in their first attacks; such an opportunity of trying their fidelity was not certainly contemplated when the monarch-makers of Congress first created this kingdom, to satisfy with this bait and the territory of Hildesheim the appetency of English ministers, who might otherwise have easily suspected that there had been nothing paid for sacrificing the interests of Italians, Saxons, Poles, or, in their own language, consolidating the masses of the three mighty monarchies, so necessary for the balance and repose of the European world.

The general disinclination of the Belgians to their union with Holland is acknowledged on all hands. It is not so clear that they are attached to France: but it is no less certain than reasonable, that they would prefer annexation to any power sufficiently strong to carry the war into a foreign territory, instead of fighting for their own borders. The old oppression of Austria would be forgotten, in consideration of such an advantage. There are certain portions of the world which seem marked out for the perpetual theatre of wars; and the quarrels of civilized Europe have for ages been decided in Saxony, in the northern portions of Italy, or in the Low Countries.

But the knowledge of this fact does not reconcile the Flemish to the necessity, at present apparent, of again putting in their claim to this fatal distinction. They have partaken for many years of the protected integrity of the French empire; and, whatever might have been the demands upon their population, or their wealth, the luxurious abundance of their fields (the garden of Europe), their unnumbered flocks and herds, and their thickly scattered villages and farms, bear witness to that boasted inviolability. They suffered little by the retreating or invading armies of the last year; and the rising generation look forward with horror to the approaching contest, which, for the first time to them, must make their country the seat of war. The occupation of Belgium by France was supposed to be the necessary and instant consequence of Napoleon's return. The day was fixed for his arrival at Brussels. It was said to be the demand of the French army and people, and the desire of the Belgians themselves.

The English and Hanoverian troops, assembled in haste on the frontiers, are now in daily expectation of an advance from the French; and in my visit to Courtray, Tournay, and Ath, a few days past, I found the military arrangements corresponding to such a notion: the towns put into a state of defence to resist a coup de main-bridges broken down-the sluices prepared to be cut a third of each garrison under arms all night-and or ders given to retreat towards Oudenarde. In Brussels, a fortnight ago, the goods of English tradesmen were hardly offered to be taken by the inhabitant shopkeeper at a fourth of their value; so sure does every one appear to be of the immediate commencement of hostilities, and the certain surrender of Belgium. I know that our military and diplomatic staff expect an instant attack. It will be seen whether we have made any guess at the intentions of Napoleon.

The Belgians, then, see they are to be the prize first fought for; and they wish, I presume, that the struggle may be as short as possible. As to any attachment to their good king, I take that to be out of the question. There has been but one nation in the world, as far as I am aware, notorious for loyalty or love of a sovereign, as such; and that nation has long repented of so mean and unreasonable an attachment. Amongst the evils of an elective monarchy, the most prominent is, that the sovereign, generally speaking, must be agreeable to the majority only of the nation. When a king is chosen for, instead of by, them, the inconvenience of discord may be thought to be removed; since in that case their dislike or their indifference to his person must be unanimous: yet, by an edict of yesterday, the 7th, the nation

al militia, a large proportion of the male population of the Netherlands, is called out to fight for leur bon roi*-that is to say, the sacrifice of lives and fortunes, the last effort of despairing patriotism, is required from a whole nation, to justify and make good the will and pleasure of the Vienna statesmen, who signed, sealed, and delivered them over, a mute and unconsulted stock, to swell the subjects of a hateful, a neighbouring, a rival, and a weaker state.

LETTER II.

Paris, April, 1815.

NO obstacle was offered to prevent my arrival at this capital. General Dornberg, at Mons, gave me a passport which carried me to Valenciennes, and which was countersigned at that place for St. Quentin, where the commissary of police again countersigned my paper for Paris. Valenciennes had lately been made a head-quarters, and the regiments of the garrison were parading under the walls as I entered the town. An officer at the post house informed me, that the Emperor's horses had arrived a few days ago. The same precautions have been taken, I since learn, in all the extremities of the empire; but my Lord Fife is wrong in stating, as I see by the English papers he does, that the Emperor must have left Paris, because his horses had been ordered for him at Compiègne. His lordship's relays were also bespoken eight days before he set off; so that, it seems, this prudent preparation is not confined to Napoleon. Tricoloured flags streamed from the public buildings, and the windows of all the houses, in the frontier towns; and this evidence of the return of Napoleon was observable in most of the towns and villages, as far as St. Quentin; from which place it appeared to me more sparingly displayed: the church steeples, however, were every where so arrayed. The pass given to me at Valenciennes, by the commissary of the customs, for my baggage, had a permission of entry into the kingdom: he took it from my hand, and scratching out that word, which had been obsolete for three weeks, wrote empire. Eleven months ago the same scratch was made for me at Calais across the imperial designation of France. But titles change now without any turn of manners; and with the exception that the fleurs de lys have disappeared from the newspapers and the pats of butter, I find here but little outward

* Their good king.

evidence of the great event which has astonished all Europe. Like the hand of a watch, the indication of the movement is most apparent at some distance from the centre. Four-and-twenty couriers have spread the convulsion to the extremity of the Russian world-the wall of China feels the shock-but Paris is tranquil. A citizen of London or Bristol, the course of whose calm existence the commotions of a corn bill are sufficient to interrupt, has little conception how the denizens of less favoured regions can stand uncrushed amidst the fall of mightiest monarchies, and more especially how the current of domestic and social joy can glide on, unruffled by the storms that darken their whole political horizon. The Englishman, put into a position of danger, is perhaps the most undaunted of his species; but the amusements of a town besieged indicate to his eyes an indifference to danger more than can be expected or even justified in man, and an habitual compound of insensibility and levity, which he is inclined rather to wonder at than admire. He would not know how to believe that on the eve of the bombardment of Dresden there was a ball at the house of the French ambassador, to cele brate the fête of the Queen of Saxony: yet the fact was so, as I heard upon the spot just after the event; and, what is more, the horse of a carriage, drawn up to carry one of the company from the house late in the morning, was killed by the fall of a shell in the court-yard, of the same house. There was a play acted at the theatre on the evening after the battle, when the suburbs were reeking with the blood of the dying and the dead. The calami ties of twenty-five years, which I date back and ascribe to the first conspiracy of crowned heads at Pilnitz, have made the individuals upon the continent familiar with scenes of blood. They have not, perhaps, become braver, but they have learnt habitually to live, like the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego, amidst lightnings which they consider as distant till they are struck by them, and the least terrible of which would appear to set our colder sky in an unextinguishable blaze. Tremblingly alive to all political events, from none of which we consider ourselves to be remote, we are astonished at their unconcern for objects which would call all our passions into play: but, although our surprise is natural, their coolness and indifference are but the unavoidable consequences of their position. It is impossible long to support a state of undiminished apprehension; and when dangers become frequent and inevitable, it is the natural resource of every mind to avert its regard rather than to fix it upon the object of alarm. Former experience has taught the citizens of the continent not only that civil and social life will continue their course, in spite of the fall of dynasties and the annihilation of armies, but that their own

individual security depends chiefly upon inaction. Thus interest conspires with habit to diminish their solicitude on the most important public events. It seems to me, therefore, unreasonable to condemn what we call the levity of Frenchmen, and that calmness under calamities which we conceive should be exchanged for the settled air of terror or discontent. The nature and method of the revolution, or, as I feel inclined to call it, the restoration which has just taken place, are such as render this placid mien less extraordinary. You have read the official account of the progress of Napoleon from Cannes to Paris. From every thing I have been able to collect, the whole detail is true to the letter. The Emperor recovered his throne, and travelled to his capital as if returning from his country seat"from the Lacedemonian Tarentum."

No disturbance of any kind has taken place in Paris. The accounts in the English News-papers, which would make it appear that this capital is as on the day of the Barricades, are known by those on the spot to be most ridiculous and malicious forgeries. I see in those honourable channels of ministerial falsehood and folly, that the partisans of Napoleon are insulted in the streets, and ladies, the wives of generals, torn from beneath the windows of the palace by the mob, for wearing imperial purple or violet-coloured robes-that strong guards surround the Tuileries and patrol the streets-that the Emperor neyer sleeps twice in the same bed-never shews himself without distrust and an ill reception, and takes every precaution against assassination. The whole is untrue from beginning to end-invented either in London by Mr. de Blacas and his worthy stipendiary of the Times, or transmitted from hearsay and the reports of the royalists on the coasts of Brittany. The misinformation of the English journals may well attract the attention of the continental world, and it is impossible to read their representations of the state of things, in France and Paris without indignation and contempt, particularly such of them as are stamped with the true image of official effrontery: but what can be expected from men who take as much pains to be ignorant and partinaciously to avert all facts as others employ to obtain a fair statement of them? A Mons.a friend of the Bourbons, has been lately employed in the north, to transmit hopes for the royal cause. His mission comprehended chiefly the Pas de Calais. His information stated, "that no movements were to be expected from any thing he had seen in that quarter in favour of the ancient dynasty." The reply of his masters conveyed to him "a dissatisfactory reception of his news and a termination of his mission," In politics, as well as war, it has been thought,