The third chapter presents us with the celebrated letter of Bonaparte to the king, which was answered by an official note with the subscription of Grenville.' The substance of this note was expanded afterwards into a speech before the house of lords by the subscriber, and the house, with very few exceptions, approved the rejection of the proposals to negotiate. Among the commons they were treated with as little ceremony; and Bonaparte's name was accompanied with epithets fitter for the meridian of Billingsgate than for men who were entrusted with the reins of government. The speeches of Mr. Erskine, Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Fox, in this memorable debate, are well detailed; and from these may be formed a tolerable estimate of their respective abilities as orators. The union with Ireland occupies the fourth chapter, in which we were much amused by an insinuation in the house of lords, that the allowance of the peers of Ireland to sit in the commons' house of parliament was calculated to create infinite confusion, by blending peers of the realm with commoners-at once vitiating the blood of the nobility, and degrading those of high birth from their rank in society. Such a strange idea might very well harmonise with the pride of the German or the late French noblesse, among whom blood is or was considered as an essential and indelible quality; but how it can apply to the peerage of these kingdoms, where marriages are contracted every day between the peer and the roturière without scandal, and the blood of the highest noble scarcely differs in the lightest shade from that of the lowest commoner, we cannot possibly conceive. The fact is, that what is called mésalliance cannot take place among us; the third generation untitles the youngest children of the highest rank; and the sixth finds them in every occupation of life. Take a hundred persons promiscuously from the exchange or the royal levee; and their respective ancestors at the sixth generation upwards will be found, alike in rank, property, and every other quality. And herein consists one of the great advantages of our own over other countries. We have no cast of nobility; our peerage is an hereditary office merely; every man in the empire is eligible into it; and as only one of a family can ever possess the office, the rest are blended with the general mass of the people ;-two separate interests cannot in this country, as in Germany now, and formerly in France, be ever esta blished.

In Ireland, a more ridiculous, or, if we were to express it in its proper terms, a more barbarous and wicked proof of equality took place on the debates of the union. Two of the chief senators, not contented with arguing the point in the representative house, had recourse to the disgraceful fashion of their own country: five shots were in consequence exchanged, and the

chancellor of the exchequer was wounded in the arm. The debate, however, proceeded; and these gentlemen, without re-, flecting on the outrageous insult they thus offered to the laws of their country, their mutual attempt to commit murder, and the degradation of placing themselves on a level with attorneys' clerks or unfledged ensigns, resumed their senatorial occupations, and persevered in their argumentative opposition. We shall not cease to brand such a conduct, wherever it occurs to us, with the contempt it deserves-and especially in the present instance, as it forms a more peculiar characteristic of our neighbours on the other side of the water than of ourselves. Among the many good effects of the union, it may be considered as not the least, that the barbarous and vindictive spirit of the Irish will have a chance of being softened down, or at least preserved only for useful and honorable purposes. The question itself was carried with great ease, notwithstanding the speeches delivered were the most vehement we have ever perused; but it may occasion some regret that the opportunity was not then embraced of freeing the state from farther discussion on the rights of the Catholics, and those of various, other denominations who are without the pale of their church.

In the fifth chapter, Mr. Sheridan's attempt to bring the Dutch expedition before the house is detailed at some length. He was answered in an explicit, if not a very satisfactory manner, by Mr. Dundas, whose account of the killed, and of those who died of their wounds, diminished very considerably the general belief of the hard conflicts in which the army was said to have been engaged-the killed amounting, according to the statement of this gentleman, to only eight hundred and forty-six, and those who died of their wounds to not more than one hundred and eighty-five. The sick and wounded admitted into the hospitals are stated at 4,088;-thus, according to this calculation of the sick and wounded, not one in twenty-two died; not one in eight received any injury at all; and not more than one in eighteen received any fatal accident. These facts are curious: but numerous private letters from Holland having exaggerated probably the distresses of the army, had so prepossessed the public mind, that the official statement seems to have afforded but little general satisfaction. The inquiry was, after a little further debate, stifled by a very great majority. Additional subsidies engaged the attention of the lords, and eventually of the commons; when, after so many averred motives for the war, Mr. Pitt at length reduced it to one word, namely, security. He proceeded in his usual manner

"It was also more than this; security against a danger the greatest that ever threatened the world—a danger which never existed before in any period of society-which threatened and had been resisted CRIT. REV. Vol.34. March, 1802.

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by all the nations of Europe, and by none with so much success as our own, because by none so uniformly, and with so much energy. Our resistance had not been confined to external force; it had joined internal policy and wise legislative measures, to oppose Jacobinism in the bosom (he was sorry to have found it there) of our own country.

"How was it discovered that Jacobinism had disappeared in France? It was now centred in one man, nursed in its school, who had gained celebrity under its auspices, and was at once the child and the champion of its atrocities-Bonaparte.

"Our security in negotiation was to be this man, who was now the organ of all that was destructive in the revolution. Granting that 200,000,000l. had been expended for the words "just and necessary," it had been expended for the best of causes-to protect the dearest rights, to defend the most valuable privileges, the laws, the liberties, the happiness of our country; and for such objects as much more would we spend, and as much more should we find.” P. 171.

Fortunately for the country, this speaker was not permitted to verify his last words; yet a great majority concurred with him in the debate. The farther suspension of the babeas-corpus act excited some severe altercation in both houses; but, as usual, the minister again succeeded.

Sir F. Burdett asserted that—

"-the power conferred by this bill had been already placed in the hands of men who abused it; illegal warrants had been issued out; powers not known to the constitution were passed into the hands of Bow-street ruffians upon the warrants of clerks in offices, who, under their authority, went down to Manchester, and dragged masters of families from their own houses at night, amidst the cries of those families; handcuffed and loaded them with irons; shut them up in Clerkenwell prison, where they were lodged under pain of body and mind. When out of their bands, they applied to the humanity of the jailor for relief, in consequence of the swellings of their legs occasioned by the treatment of these savages. What would the immortal Chatham have said on the recital of such oppression? the thunder of his eloquence would have shaken the house, and the avenues would have been thronged with auditors, whilst he had pointed out wherein the superiority of our country, wherein the excellence of our constitution, consisted. It was in this, that the cottage of the peasant was as sacred as the palace of the king: though humbly thatched, it was secure, and an asylum which dared not be violated. He would have raised a storm from which the senators would gladly have screened their heads, and hastened to their homes:but, now, the character of the house was power and not language, and majorities did not depend on reasoning." P. 180.

A strange veil seems to have been thrown over the proceedings in the Cold-bath-fields' prison, and the more so, because, if

lord Belgrave's mode of exonerating ministers from the charge of inhumanity be allowed, a question naturally suggests itself which it is difficult to answer. The ministers, according to his lordship, are not culpable, because there had been an accidental inattention in the superintendant of a prison.' This accidental inattention refers, we believe, to the case of colonel Despard. But this does not appear to have been the only accident of the sort; since a number of other persons, confined merely on suspicion, were proved to have been equally ill-treated. Yet we cannot find that ministers ever testified the remotest disapprobation of the jailor's conduct.

From parliamentary debates, we are carried, in the sixth chapter, to the East Indies, and our attention is engaged by the war with Tippoo Sultaun. The secret causes of this war still remain, it is properly observed, to be explored; the event, however, was glorious to the British arms. The East-India company increased its territories at the expense of the defeated monarch, whose dominions were divided, upon his death, between the company, the Nizam, the Mahrattas, and a descendent of the ancient rajahs of Mysore. The capture of the capital gave wealth to our troops; and the monarch was interred with all the honors due to his imperial station. From India we are transported to America, where the death of the great and good Washington is the only event we meet with to disturb the happiness of that country.

The foreign history commences with chapter the seventh; in which is given an account of Bonaparte's new constitution, and his attempt to negotiate with England. The eighth chapter dilates on the affairs of the Ligurian and Batavian republics, and the horrors exercised at Naples, in which the vindictive spirit of royalty seemed to contend with republicanism in cruelty and ferocity.

• But whatever tyranny was exercised in the north of Italy, whatever vengeance was let loose on those whom caprice or principle might have led to the adoption of other forms of government than those under which, previous to the invasion of the French, the inhabitants of those now devoted countries had been accustomed to live, they were light and trivial compared to the unexampled horrore which deluged the territory of Naples. The violation of the treaties entered into with the members of the late republican government of that country is now become a part of history: and were not the details of these transactions (of which we gave but a very slight sketch in our narrative of the events of the last year) authenticated by the most incontrovertible testimony, we should be led to refuse our belief to the commission of deeds, the bare recital of which must strike every mind with dismay and horror. The vengeance of the court of Sicily remained yet unsatiated with its multitudes of victims. After six months of carnage, in which had fallen on the scaf

fold, or perished at the gallows, whatever Naples contained most distinguished for talent, or most illustrious for birth, the bloody axe, the dungeon, or exile, continued the dreadful instruments of its impolitic vengeance. Scarcely a family in Naples but had to lament the loss of some relation. Fidelity to the royal cause in parents, essential services rendered to the court, was no exemption from the calamity of seeing their children massacred before their eyes. Here a whole posterity was swept away; there whole families, and those of the highest class, became extinct.' P. 223.

The apparent destruction of the French interest in Egypt, by the treaty for their quitting the country, forms the most interesting part of this chapter, which concludes with the general conduct of the courts of Berlin, Sweden, Copenhagen, and Spain, at this period.

The ninth chapter is full of action. The decisive campaigns of Bonaparte and Moreau are described with great spirit; and the conduct of Massena in his arduous situation gives him a claim to very high distinction. He was sent from Paris, not to conquer, for that could not be expected, but to retain possession of the town of Genoa as long as possible. In this he justified to the utmost the opinion formed of his bravery and military prudence. He saved the French territories from an earlier invasion, and surrendered the town at such a time, that the Austrians, flushed with their victory, pursued with confidence the plan formed in the cabinet of Vienna, and were already in opinion masters of the south of France. Their general, in the midst of these presumptuous hopes, is appalled by the defeat of his troops a hundred miles in his rear, by an army descending with Bonaparte from the Alps; and, instead of advancing to the conquest of France, he measures back his steps to encounter this formidable name :-the decisive battle of Marengo restores Italy to the French, and renders Bonaparte the arbiter of Europe. At the same time, the affairs of France revive in Egypt. The British ministry refuse to confirm the convention entered into with Kleber; hostilities are renewed; the grandvizier is completely defeated, and the French are again masters of this entire province. Thus terminates the almost romantic history of the year 1800. At its commencement, the government of Bonaparte was deemed to be without stability: but his genius pervaded every department of the state; he gave the evidence of facts as a decisive proof of his capacity to treat with foreign powers; and every thing seemed to augur that he would be the most powerful sovereign in Europe.

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The principal occurrences of the year are detailed in the usual manner, in which are many circumstances highly honorable to our navy; and it is not without pleasure that every Englishman will see so large a portion of this department thus