Poems on Various Subjects.

NOTE.

Since the foregoing pages were written, I have heard that Mr. O'Meara, in his Memoirs of Buonaparte, asserts that, having lent the Emperor a volume I published "On the Events of his Government of a Hundred Days," Buonaparte declared first, that it was a very silly composition, filled with a string of falsehoods; secondly, that he had never worn any other breastplate than his flannel‐waistcoat; and thirdly, that the book, foolish as it was, must have been well paid. With regard to the imputation of my work being silly, it is before the Public and must defend itself; but when Buonaparte added "that it was filled with falsehoods," he well knew that all it uttered was truth; and indeed so much anger has something of a guilty air; nothing is calmer than innocence. With respect to the slight circumstance of his having worn, during the latter part of his reign, some kind of mysterious ægis beneath his flannel‐waistcoat, I shall only repeat that it was a fact of public notoriety at Paris, and that it gave a very awkward appearance to his person. But

I hasten from his coating to a far more serious allegation against me, that of having been well paid. What pages of my volume deserved best the recompense? Was it the tribute offered to Kosciusko, the hero of Poland; or to La Fayette, the veteran of liberty in two worlds? It is the misfortune of those who write in times of revolution, that every successive Government begins by proclaiming principles which the friend of liberty is tempted to applaud, and as regularly ends by governing in its own way. Exulting in the fall of one tyranny, the heart deludes itself with the hope of better things from new rulers, who take care, in their turn, to convict the dreamer of folly. All I said of Buonaparte, in that volume, were well known facts, upon which the stamp of fate was impressed, and which, while I traced them in a feeble sketch, History had already seized, and graven with her iron pen. If the glow of enthusiastic feeling were not one of the things which it is difficult to buy or sell, the person by whom I might most reasonably be suspected of having been heretofore paid, was Buonaparte himself. But no: when I offered incense at his shrine, when I never pronounced his name without emotion, he had no recompense to give: he was not then an Emperor. My first lavish

panegyric on Buonaparte, in my "Tour through Switzerland," was published before he went to Egypt, when no imperial diadem bound his brows, and he was only the Deliverer of Italy. At the date of my succeeding eulogium, in "A Sketch of the State of France towards the End of the Eighteenth Century," he was simply first Consul, with no other title than that of citizen; but I own I praised him as extravagantly as if consuls, like kings, could do no wrong. His imperial purple at length cured my enthusiasm, and no odes of my inditing hailed his coronation, or his marriage; I saluted with no acclamations the daughter of the Cæsars, and essayed no imitation of Pollio on the birth of the King of Rome.

Weary of military despotism, I rejoiced indeed in the deliverance of the country, although not insensible to the bitter pang which must have rankled in the breast of the fallen monarch; but while his misfortunes are pitied by the lovers of liberty, they must not be compelled to mourn over him as its friend. He! who finished the Revolution by undoing all it had done; who overthrew its best and most sacred institutions, with the mockery of a Senate that was prostrate, and a Legislature that was mute; who gave back to France her courtly pageantry her titles, her

distinctions, her feudal majorats, and wrested from her those equal rights for which she had sacrificed them all; till at length his frantic ambition, unsatisfied with the inheritance of empires, brought hosts of strangers within the gates of the capital, while Liberty hid her prostrate head the dust. It was he who accustomed Europe to the action of immense masses of armed men, and thus gave rise to those Holy Alliances of bayonets, which hover over the nations with new invasions, new despotism and consequently new revolutions.