ples were truth, honour, and justice. She had retained the
reverence of her forefathers for the Sanctuary; and the same guidance
which had in the beginning taught her wisdom, ultimately crowned her with
victory. I lived through a period of the most overwhelming vicissitudes of
nations, and of the great disturber himself, who had caused those
vicissitudes. I saw Napoleon at the head of 500,000 men on the Niemen; I
saw him reduced to 50,000 on the plains of Champagne; I saw him reduced to
a brigade at Fontainebleau; I saw him a burlesque of empire at Elba; and I
saw him an exile on board a British ship, departing from Europe to
obscurity and his grave. These things may well reconcile inferior talents
to the changes of fortune. But they should also teach nations, that the
love of conquest is national ruin; and that there is a power which avenges
the innocent blood. No country on earth requires that high moral more than
France; and no country on earth has more bitterly suffered for its
perversion. Napoleon was embodied France; the concentrated spirit of her
wild ambition, of her furious love of conquest, of her reckless scorn of
the sufferings and rights of mankind. Nobler principles have followed,
under a wiser rule. But if France draws the sword again in the ambition of
Napoleon, she will exhibit to the world only the fate of Napoleon. It will
be her last war.

On my arrival in England, I found the public mind clouded with almost
universal dejection. Pitt was visibly dying. He still held the nominal
reins of government for some period; but the blow had been struck, and his
sole honour now was to be, that, like the Spartan of old, he died on the
field, and with his buckler on his arm. There are secrets in the
distribution of human destinies, which have always perplexed mankind; and
one of those is, why so many of the most powerful minds have been cut off
in the midst of their career, extinguished at the moment when their fine
faculties were hourly more essential to the welfare of science, of
government, and of the general progress of society.

I may well comprehend that feeling, for it was my own. I saw Pitt laid in
the grave; I looked down into the narrow bed where slept all that was
mortal of the man who virtually wielded the whole supremacy of Europe.
Yet how little can man estimate the future! Napoleon was in his glory,
when Pitt was in his shroud. Yet how infinitely more honoured, and thus
more happy, was the fate of