paper on the continent, is plentifully interspersed with italics, as if the facts disclosed were of momentous interest and novelty.

We are now, however, advancing to more recent times, and times in which the information of the author might, if ever, be expected to be really original and valuable. And here, we confess, we were a little surprized to learn that, in the campaign of Moscow, Buonaparte was really successful!-that his gigantic project was executed in all those parts which opposed, as had been presumed, insurmountable obstacles to his success ;'—that ' he had rendered the re-establishment of Poland an optional measure;'that his advance on Moscow, which vanity dictated, to commemorate the glory of the conquest, could have been attended with no disaster or even inconvenience, if political speculations had not induced a continuation in that capital beyond twenty days;'-and that, after all, the French army would have regained their position on the Dwina and Boristhenes without any serious injury, had it not been for a sudden intense frost, and a total neglect to provide horse-shoes suitable to the climate, excepting for Napoleon's own horses!'-pp. 23, 24.

If Buonaparte had really, as is here supposed, the option of reestablishing Poland, it is manifest that the half measures which he pursued, and the manner in which he trifled with the expectations of that unfortunate country, were unworthy of a great and liberal politician,—no less than an advance to Moscow, dictated by vanity only, was unworthy of an experienced captain. Again: to advance to Moscow without an object, and with the previous intention of retreating immediately, was a strange way of administering to the vanity of his troops; since the world, we believe, is generally apt to suspect some ulterior views in all such forward movements,and to construe a return of the kind contemplated by Sir Robert Wilson into something like defeat and discomfiture. When Masseua retired from Portugal, we believe the vanity of his soldiers was not very greatly elevated by their having advanced to the neighbourhood of Lisbon,-nor did he venture to tell the world that, when he commenced his invasion of that country, he had never calculated on doing more. There was an ancient king of France, whose prowess to this effect is celebrated in the songs of our childhood. But, to march up a hill' with the express and sole intention of marching down again' was surely far less absurd than the act of conducting an army three hundred miles, from Wilna to Moscow, for no better reason than to say that he had been there. Nor do we think so meanly of Buonaparte's abilities as to suppose that, if he had really set out from Poland with the intention of returning thither before the winter shut in, he would have neglected to provide magazines for the support of his retreating army; or

that

that so obvious a precaution as proper horse-shoes would have been forgotten, if his retreat, when it took place, had been an expected or even a voluntary measure. Of course we cannot contest, with an officer of Sir Robert Wilson's experience, the question how far an army, infantry and all, may be destroyed for want of being rough-shod; we will not even stay to inquire, whether the author would have himself suggested King Lear's delicate stratagem,' of using felt for that purpose, over icy roads. But it is somewhat strange that, if the want of horse-shoes had been so total and calamitous in the French army as he supposes, not one of the different military writers, who were partakers in its sufferings, should have enumerated this among the causes of its exemplary destruction.

To a sudden, though not, as Sir Robert Wilson supposes, an unusually severe or early frost, we are as fully disposed as he can be, to ascribe the completion of that ruin which overthrew the hopes of the mighty. But we must also persist in joining to this aweful interposition of Heaven, the infatuated and overweening confidence of Buonaparte in his own power and destiny, an infatuation which led him to aim at the overturn of Russia when he ought to have applied all his efforts to the renovation of Poland, and which induced him to linger in a dismantled city, at a season when every hour was valuable, and when at every moment that frost might be looked for which found him, at last, unprepared.

There is yet another cause of Buonaparte's overthrow, to which Sir Robert Wilson attaches less importance than we do—we mean the admirable discipline and bravery of the Russian army; backed, as it was in the whole extent of country which the invader traversed, by the loyalty and zeal of a hardy and, on the whole, (as Sir Robert Wilson truly states,) a happy and prosperous peasantry, with whom his troops found it impossible to establish a friendly communication, and who were as warmly interested for the honour of Russia as the proudest nobles of Moscow. Where our author picked up his rumour of proposals made to Napoleon, and refused by him, for exciting a servile war, we cannot tell. No doubt there are, in all countries, men of disappointed hopes and desperate characters, who are ready to undertake or suggest any scheme, however wicked or preposterous, in behalf of a public enemy. But, we will venture to say, the author of this proposal (if such a proposal were really made) was as ignorant as the French themselves were of the Muscovite character, if he believed that their peasants, even the most oppressed and discontented among them, would join the cause of a Niemetsky invader.*

As

'Niemetsky, a term of reproach applied to all who cannot speak Slavonian.—We can

net

As to the various anecdotes which follow of misconduct on the part of the Russian commanders at that period, we are inclined, for the following reasons, to attach but little weight to them :-As, by the author's own statement, they were pretty nearly counterbalanced by the oversight of the horse-shoes, and various other blunders in the French army,-they can prove, and are, apparently, intended to prove nothing more than a position which we are not called on to combat,-that Sir Robert Wilson himself is a more skilful commander than either Kutusoff or Buonaparte. Nor, allowing to the utmost extent, the facts alleged, can we think it by any means unusual or extraordinary that, in operations so extensive and so hurried, many opportunities may have been lost, and many errors committed, which, though they might not escape the eye of an acute bystander, would not very materially affect the issue of the war, or the military reputation of either general. We are, too, a little in doubt whether a bye-stander is always a competent judge of the details of a campaign, or the movements of armies, with whose wants and the obstacles with which they have to contend, he is often imperfectly acquainted. We are men of peace ourselves, but we are not so ignorant of the usual chit-chat of head-quarters, as to attach any implicit faith to all the curious facts which a foreigner is sure to pick up there, or to be blind to the extreme difficulty with which authentic information is to be obtained even by those best qualified to make inquiries. Sir Robert Wilson is, we believe, himself acquainted with an officer of high rank and of considerable reputation as an able partizan,' who, nevertheless, thought fit to enliven a period of inaction during the Spanish war, by dispatching to head-quarters a false report of a victory gained by the corps under his command; a circumstance which, to say no more of it, has had a considerable effect in making us incredulous as to military details derived from extra-official sources.

We are next presented with an idle story of a private conversation between the Emperor Alexander and the Crown-Prince of Sweden, in which the former is said to have expressed himself favourably to certain views of the latter on the succession to the French throne. (p. 38.) We call this an idle story because, if true, it is nothing to the purpose of the present volume :-it does not shew either ambition or treachery on the part of Russia, since it amounts to no more than that, if the will of the French people had called Bernadotte to the throne, Alexander would not have

not agree with our author in stating the comforts of a Russian peasant to be greater than those usually enjoyed by an Englishman. But he has, certainly, given a more accurate representation of their condition than Dr. Clarke, and we would wish him, therefore, to reflect, how improbable it is that they whom he speaks of as the happiest clowns in the world, should yet be eager to adopt the wildest schemes of a revolutionary war.

opposed

opposed their choice. But where was Sir Robert Wilson when these words were spoken, or from what better authority than the booksellers' shops of Paris and Vienua has he received them ?— or how is it to be endured that a conversation in its nature most private, and which neither of the parties concerned were, for their own sakes, likely to communicate to an Englishman, an accredited bookmaker and a retailer of secret histories, should be as confidently given between inverted commas, as if it were extracted from their published correspondence or avowed state-papers?

Due praise, and no more than due is given to the admirable firmness and unwearied activity of Alexander, during the invasion of his territories and his subsequent advance into Germany; and a fact is stated, respecting the amount of the Russian forces, which we must again request the reader to bear in mind—namely, that the whole number of troops which, under circumstances peculiarly stimulating, the undivided energies of their empire could supply to act in Germany, was, including Cossacks and Bashkirs, a hundred and forty thousand men. (pp. 41, l. 4-42, 1. 7.)

On the account here given of the battle of Lutzen we have no observations to make. In speaking of the operations which followed, Sir Robert's zeal for Buonaparte's reputation has, we conceive, outrun his knowledge :-thus he tells us (pp. 45, 46) that the allies had been completely unsuccessful in all their enterprizes down to the 16th of October inclusive; and that the retreat and concentration of Buonaparte's troops, in the neighbourhood of Leipzig, was only in consequence of his having learned, through General Meerfeldt, that Bavaria meditated defection.__ But (p. 54) we are also told, that, at the time of his retreat from Dresden, and the concentration of his troops near Leipzig, he was ignorant of the Bavarian defection,' and therefore left St. Cyr in Dresden with nearly thirty thousand men.' To such strange inconsistencies are those idolaters of Napoleon reduced, who will not allow that their deity has experienced defeat, and must yet account for measures which defeat only could render necessary or advisable.

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Still more remarkable, however, are Sir Robert's lamentations for the treatment which his favourite received from the government of Switzerland, who permitted the allied troops to advance through their territory. That a free people,' he exclaims,' the descendants of William Tell, enjoying their independent neutrality, allowed to preserve it, and in a position to maintain it, should abandon, yield, or negociate away a right so important for their country, and so solemnly declared to be inviolable, was only to be conceived by those who hold that public virtue is but an Utopian theory.' (p. 59.) How strangely can faction and a few months' conversation with the Jacobin coteries of Paris corrupt even the best understanding!

The

The Sir Robert Wilson of former days would have been himself the first to reply, in answer to such idle cant as this, that it was precisely because the Swiss were the countrymen of William Tell that they exulted in the deliverance of Europe from a far heavier yoke than that which Austria had in former times endeavoured to impose on their ancestors. He would have shewn that it was because they really desired to be in a condition to maintain their independent neutrality' in the quarrels of Europe, and not merely to be allowed to preserve it' at the pleasure of an overbearing neighbour; that they rejoiced to see that conqueror humbled whose gigantic empire girt in their small domain. He would have shewn that it was because the Swiss had not forgotten the recent heroism of Reding and his fellow-patriots that they were anxious to see the consummation of that great work in which those brave men had shed their blood, and to shake off that subjection to the dictates of France which their author calls independence. Does Sir Robert Wilson seriously believe that, if the government of the Swiss confederacy had ventured to oppose the passage of the allies, the Swiss nation would not have behaved as the Saxon and Prussian nations had already done, and either compelled their rulers to a change of policy, or, in spite of those rulers, have followed the bent of their own enthusiasm ? Is he not well aware (however it may now suit his purpose to forget the fact) that in all these countries, and in every country of the continent, it was with the people, not with their government, that the spirit of opposition to the French power began?-or what Lethe has washed out of his brain the many circumstances of aggravation and injury, the extinction of commerce, the suppression of public feeling, the undesired interference, the intolerable protection, which in Switzerland, as in Holland and Germany, made the great body of the commonalty detest Buonaparte and his empire with a degree of bitterness which no former conqueror has provoked from the victims of his ambition?

Of the days which followed, and which ended in the capture of Paris and the treaty of 1814, the transactions,' as Sir Robert Wilson observes, are familiar to the public recollection;' and he has therefore thought fit to give a view of them, not only entirely at variance with the general impression of Europe concerning them, but, we will venture to say, with the impressions of some of the best informed military observers of the time, and who, instead of receiving their details from the orators of the Palais Royal, were really with the armies, and sharers in their glory and anxiety. The following is Sir Robert Wilson's statement of Buonaparte's conduct of that memorable struggle :

:

• With sixty thousand brave and indefatigable men he baffled the operations