ess children are said to have perished. One
cannot, without horror, reflect upon such brutal acts of inhumanity. The
French troops on divers occasions, and in different parts of the empire,
acted tragedies of the same nature, which are not easily reconcileable
to the character of a nation famed for sentiment and civility. The
Hanoverians having advanced within a league of Zell, the two armies
began to cannonade each other; the French troops, posted on the right of
the Aller, burned their magazines, and retired into the town, where they
were so strongly intrenched, that prince Ferdinand could not attempt the
river, the passes of which were strongly guarded by the enemy. At the
same time, his troops were exposed to great hardships from the severity
of the weather; he, therefore, retreated to Ultzen and Lunenburgh,
where his army was put into winter-quarters, and executed several
small enterprises by detachment, while the French general fixed his
headquarters in the city of Hanover, his cantonments extending as far
as Zell, in the neighbourhood of which many sharp skirmishes were fought
from the out-parties with various success. Their imperial majesties
were no sooner apprized of these transactions, which they considered as
infractions of the convention, than they sent an intimation to the baron
de Steinberg, minister from the king of Great Britain as elector of
Hanover, that he should appear no more at court, or confer with their
ministers; and that his residing at Vienna, as he might easily conceive,
could not be very agreeable: in consequence of which message he retired,
after having obtained the necessary passports for his departure. The
chagrin occasioned at the court of Vienna by the Hanoverian army's
having recourse to their arms again, was, in some measure, alleviated
by the certain tidings received from Petersburgh, that the czarina had
signed her accession in form to the treaty between the courts of Vienna,
Versailles, and Stockholm.

DEATH OF THE QUEEN OF POLAND, &c.

In closing our account of this year's transactions on the continent, we
may observe, that on the sixteenth day of November the queen of Poland
died at Berlin of an apoplexy, supposed to be occasioned by the shock
she received on hearing that the French were totally defeated
at Rosbach. She was a lady of exemplary virtue and piety; whose
constitution had been broke by grief and anxiety conceived from the
distress of her own family, as well as