strengthened this contempt, from the consciousness, that if they were to be resisted at all, it must be by a spirit of purified religion. They struggled to obtain the mastery of the Church, first by division; by proclaiming the merits of the parochial clergy as unrewarded, while they pointed to the ostentatious luxury of the dignitaries raised to their rank by Court favour, by the accident of birth, and by the darker price of individual corruption. Having thus weakened the union of the Establishment, and filled the inferior portion with the revolutionary principle, all was done, and they waited but the moment to throw the torch into the mine. It was thrown in, and the explosion left, of Church and State, but dust and ashes.

It is seldom sufficiently adverted to, that the primary object of the Revolutionists was the fall of Religion-that the primary triumph of the rebels was the ruin of the Establishment, and that the consummation of the Republican victory was in the decree that "There was no God!" The Revolution had been commenced fifty years before; and its commencement was not in railings at the vices of government, or sorrowings over the pressures of the people, but in scoffings at religion. The first act of popular supremacy was to tear down, stone by stone, the altars of France, and cover their ruins with the blood of the priesthood. The grand success was to abolish the principle of religion. All thenceforth was easy, and in the natural flow of human things. The massacres, the innumerable and indescribable abominations of France, were the simple result of the extinc tion of the belief in a God, and a future state. The fire had been kindled in the forest, and it might be thenceforth left to itself; the natural blow ing of the wind was enough to spread and rouse it into universal conflagration.

The true death of the Revolution instantly followed this triumph. It had done its work, and might now pass away, leaving its remaining offices of national calamity to inferior influences. That mighty shape of evil, that seemed almost an embodying of the original enemy of man, had now achieved its conquest, and might retire to its place of darkness, leaving the fallen land to be overshadowed

and polluted by the flights of its subordinate ministers of ruin.

With the fall of Robespierre, the true Republic went down to the grave. All that followed was an approach to the regular governments of Europe, yet so remote as to be scarcely distin guishable from the wild and barbarous anarchy of the past, But the attempts of the more moderate Revolutionists were evidently gaining ground-some deference for personal security and national law influenced the public councils-some efforts for the formation of a government which Europe could recognise were visible; and though France was still hideous to the eye, and still priding herself in that revolutionary costume, every fold of which was stiffened with blood, yet the axe in her hand dripped no more. It was at this period that the future monarch of Continental Europe ap peared. In 1791 he had attracted notice by his plan for the attack of Toulon, then Royalist, and garrisoned by the Allies. The ignorance of the Allied officers at the beginning of a war-the disunion and pusillanimity of a force composed of various nations, chiefly of the unwarlike South,-and perhaps treachery, a common agent in the successes of the time, gave Toulon into the hands of the French general Dugommier, whose head would have answered to the Convention for failure, and whose gratitude recommended the young officer of engineers to the notice of his government. Bonaparte was appointed Chief of Battalion, and ordered to the army of Italy. He had now ascended the first step of his throne.

But the memory of Robespierre rendered the Government which rose on his ruin, jealous of his partisans. Bonaparte had been distinguished for jacobinism. His stern and vindictive nature had easily adopted the furious tone of the early Democracy, and his absence with the army probably alone saved him from the general catastrophe. The stupendous course of good and evil to France that was to flow from the genius and fortune of this extraordinary man, might have been cut off in its source by the revolutionary steel. He was arrested,but released at the instance of his countryman, Salicetti, a partisan of the new Government.

In 1795 he came to Paris to solicit

employment in his profession. His Jacobin taint resisted the influence of his friends, and in restlessness and poverty he meditated what would probably have been at once the final abandonment of his country, and of his religion. He applied for leave to go into the Turkish service; but the place of his destiny was France, and his career was at that moment about to open.

The Parisian mob, which, organized as an army, had hitherto been the true lords of the Government, rose against the Convention. Menou, the general of the Conventional troops, exhibited want of nerve, where all depended on instant and vigorous execution. The Government had put its fate into the hands of Barras. Barras had been at the siege of Toulon, and remembered the energy of Bonaparte. -Bonaparte had been a spectator of the assault of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, and had been known to express his contempt equally of the defence and of the attack. It is not improbable, that in the present crisis the professional soldier should have repeated his contempt, or that the habitual solicitor for employment should have offered his services. He was sent for by Barras, and invested with the command of 6000 troops, the last hope of the Convention. He threw his lit tle army into the Tuileries, prepared for battle on the instant, and within a few hours received, at the mouth of his guns, the attack of 30,000 men.

The action was brief. The army of the Sections was staggered by finding that the first furious impulse of a mob was no longer to be victory, even in Paris. A few discharges of grape-shot scattered them like sheep from the front of the armed posts; and from that day forth the reign of the rabble was undone. The Convention, rescued from the guillotine, was grateful, and while Barras was placed at the head of the garrison of Paris, Bonaparte was appointed second in command.

humiliating to true honour. Barras, at the head of the Directory, and thus virtual master of all that France could offer to his ambition or his vices, had been the declared admirer of Madame Beauharnois-a handsome Creole of St. Domingo. At all times, the profligate habits of France have at once given extraordinary influence to women in public affairs, and have sanctioned the use of the most profligate means of purcha sing its exercise. To marry the faded mistress of a man of rank, was among the most customary modes of promotion. It is not to charge Bonaparte with peculiar baseness, but to speak of him as complying with the received custom of candidates for honours, that he is stated to have relieved Barras of a rejected mistress, as the price of his appointment to the command of the army of Italy. The statement was notorious at the time-it was suitable to the morals of France-it was repulsive to no delicacy in the reckless, profligate, and ambitious mind of Bonaparte,-and to doubt it, without stronger ground than the contempt of an English mind for the morals of the coun try and the man, would be to unsettle all the faith of history. If we should require an evidence of the feeble share which his love took with his ambition in this marriage, it might be found in the rapidity of his departure to assume the command. At a time when no hazard of the troops required his presence, he remained but three days with his bride, before he hurried to the army, and attacked the Austro-Sardinians. He was married on the 9th of March 1796,-within one month, (April 10,) the battle of Monte Notte was fought, and he looked from the summit of the Alps on the plains of that lovely and magnificent land, in which he was to win his most unstained glories.

by the opulence and by the divisions of its sovereignties, the native and acknowledged superiority of the French soldier over the indolent and effeminate man of the South,-all stimulated him to the attack of Italy. With the Directory, the motives were, if less personal, equally strong. The battle

had, fill now, been fought along the eastern and northern boundary of France. Austria, often defeated, had still struggled boldly; and army after army had been lost in the attempt to plunge into the land of forests and mountains beyond the Rhine. The talents of the ablest generals, and the gallantry of the most enthusias tic troops of the Republic had been wasted against the solid fortresses, or the still more unconquerable morasses, defiles, and torrents, of that vast region of wild nature and fierce soldiership. But Italy lay before the French armies an open champaign, the German was there stripped of the native defences that check the march of an invader more than the sword. He was, like the Frenchman, a stranger in a land of strangers; and if more known, was known but as the foreign master of a people feeling their chains enough to rejoice at the coming of a foreign deliverer, though without the honest energy to break them for themselves. The Austrian troops in Italy, too, were of an inferior rank to those of the armies that had fought the battles on the Rhine, and made the chief glory of some of the finest officers of the Republic consist in the dexterity of their escape from the pursuing thunders of the Archduke Charles. To attack Austria in Germany, was thus to charge the grand army of an empire of soldiers in its front; to attack it in Italy was to fall upon the rear of the camp, and sacrifice the rabble of stragglers and loiterers among the baggage. But the singular sensitiveness of Austria to the fate of her Italian dominions was also known; and the sagacity of the young General of the army of Italy, pointed out to his government the direct result of Italian triumph in reliev ing the French armies on the Rhine. He knew that while Austria had a man, or a musket to put into his hand, she would fight for her Lombard provinces, that she would dismantle every regiment in front of her enemies on the West to support the struggle in the South; and that while she listened with scorn to the remote echo of the war on the German frontier, the first cannon fired from the Tyrolese hills would sound like a thunderclap in the ears of Vienna. If peace was to be conquered, it must be by the triumphs of that army at whose head

Bonaparte was now to move, the presiding genius of France and victory.

A plan of the war, on a vast scale, was then formed, by which the Italian army was to press on to the instant mastery of the Lombard provinces, while the Rhenish army was to take advantage of the first weakness in the opposite line of the Archduke, and both were to push forward, until the conquerors, descending from the Tyrol, met the pursuing troops of Moreau under the walls of the Austrian capital.

Bonaparte found his army lying exposed on the mountains without tents, in rags, without pay, and full of murmurs at themselves and their Government. But they amounted to more than forty thousand men, active, and accustomed to the mountain hardships and warfare, eager for plunder and battle, and contemptuous of the enemy. Delay would have produced mutiny, if his nature had not been the total reverse of tardiness. He led them instantly to the passage of the Alps by the lower range, where the mountains stoop to the Mediterranean. In this march towards Genoa, the key of the avenue from Rome to Piedmont, his flank moved under the hills on which was cantoned the Austro-Sardinian army, united for the defence at once of Turin and the Milanese, under the command of Beaulieu. The ages of the opposing Generals were as strongly contrasted as their fortunes. Bonaparte was twenty-six, Beaulieu seventy-five. The Austrians poured down in separate columns on the army moving below; the French resisted bravely, but on the whole were beaten, until nightfall. But their General was now in the field made for the display of his subtle activity. While the Austrians, intending to complete the victory next morning, halted on the ground, Bonaparte put his troops in motion, manoeuvred round the Austrian centre during the night, and by daybreak rushed to an attack, which broke the enemy with the loss of colours, guns, and some thousand prisoners.

The beaten army, still strong, and still resisting, was again attacked by this indefatigable soldier. Incessant battle at length wasted the Austrians. They trembled for the Milanese. The Sardinians withdrew to the defence of their territory. The latter were pur

They instinctively surround their fortress with the swamp and the thicket, and feel secure only in repelling the advance of the generous labours of man for human amelioration, and in turning the light of heaven into mysticism and gloom. Herculaneum and Pompeii are but feeble emblems of the huge and silent ruin that has covered Italy, of the grace and grandeur of the past, or of the dimness and monumental hopelessness of the time to

come.

The little Italian cities rose by Liberty. With Liberty came opulence; for all that is essential to rouse the latent vigour of man, is the assurance that the fruits of his labour shall be his own. Their successes were mira culous. They had opened a new mine, and the unexhausted treasures that had lain for ages hid too deep for the rude eye and hurrying tread of the northern invasions, were now spread lavishly before the hand of their powerful and gifted discoverers. The soldier, the merchant, the statesman, the poet, the painter of Italy, found no rivals in the circuit of the world. It was the great mart of genius, from which every nation purchased, yet found it still full, still glittering with new and tasteful splendour.

There is no striking portion of Eu rope which has not successively had its day of being tried for empire. France, Germany, Spain, have been in their turn at the head of Europe, and have lost their hope of settled supremacy, only by some palpable want of wisdom or virtue. The day of Italian supremacy was brilliant but brief. Opulence produced vice. There was no vigour in the national religion to purify the people from the habitual corruption of prosperity. The first symptoms of that great epidemic, which was so rapidly to prostrate the strength and the fame of the Penin sula, were found in the guilty readiness of the people to sell themselves to a master for the bribe of their ava rice or passions. Civil war followed; the arts and commerce fled from the sound of blood-thirsty faction. The philosopher sought an asylum in some land less tortured with petty tyranny. The Christian shrunk from the double persecution of the despot and the priest. The general debasement of the human mind grew out of the de

basement of public principle. The Italian at length saw his country the habitual prey of the great bordering powers, and he saw it with only the anxiety to know which would be the safer side. He followed the rival hosts to the field, not to share in the gallantry of the struggle, but to profit by the spoils of the fallen. He was a suttler before the battle-a fugitive while it was fighting-a plunderer when it was done. He purchased immunity by contempt, and secured his few remaining privileges only by the prompt embrace of his chains.

But human nature, however trained to slavery, will feel its humiliation. The sounds of freedom from France were loud. The Italian, full of lofty remembrances, kept green and vivid by the eagerness with which the mind takes refuge from the present in the dignities of the past, or the hopes of the future, was told of the glories of his ancestors; the coming of the victorious army of a Republic, emulating the name and forms of his own renowned Commonwealth, and, above all, headed by an Italian, was new life; was rejoiced in as the opening of a flood-gate of triumph, the epoch of boundless renovation to the native land of arts and empire.

The peculiar feebleness of the Italian sovereigns at this period, laid them at the mercy of the first bold incursion. Bound to Austria, so far as to lose the moral force belonging to national independence, they yet retained a jealous assumption of authority, just sufficient to deprive them of the strength belonging to the union of vassals. With all that was abject in slavery, they had all that was weak in freedom. Naples, the Papal States, and Venice, at once hated and intrigued with each other. The Milanese and Tuscany were Austrian provinces; the petty princes, whose territories lay compressed between the limits of the greater states, hated and intrigued with all. As a nation, Italy hated Austria, and was kept in submission only by fear. As individuals, the people scorned their princes-exulted in the coming of that day, when they should be revenged on their dissolute and degenerate dynasties-when they should see the revenues of the state no longer lavished on actresses and minions, and the life of the Italian,