web of sophistry by which he is entangled: and he is, therefore, like other creatures of circumstances, everything by turns, and nothing long. But this very weakness of Mr. Ward should have protected him from much that has been said of him-certainly from the charge of being actuated by motives of gain. He may be weak, and little aware of his true position with regard to ecclesiastical politics, but he is not dishonest; worldly gain has, less than anything, entered into his contemplation; he has not for one moment been swayed by such crafty considerations. He has gained an unenviable eminence: he has paid dearly for it: perhaps even yet he may be dragged through more painful scenes. But we must distinguish between him and those who have urged him on to ruin. We may pity though we must condemn him-them we must not pity when we condemn.

ART. IX.-Fêtes et Souvenirs du Congrès de Vienne. Tableaux des Salons, Scenes, Anecdotiques, et Portraits. 18141815. Par LE COMTE A. de la GARDE. Bruxelles et Leipzig, C. Muequardt. 1845, 5 Vols. 12mo.

When

THE imperial city of Achen, the Aix la Chapelle of the noble Charlemagne, was, as long as the old Germanic-Roman empire lasted, the chosen city wherein were used to be rearranged those national disputes, the confusion of which was only worse confounded by the alternating issues of sanguinary war. the ancient German empire ceased, and the new Cæsar was confined to his own capital at Vienna, the latter city became the arena for the settlement of a multitude of matters that need never have been disturbed. But the influences of Achen were not to be crushed by the power or the attractions of the city of the Danube, and for the last time the city so glorious in decay, became, in 1818, the scene of the last congress assembled to form a decision which collective wisdom had never been called upon to make, had individual good sense been previously something more common.

Of the dying glories of Achen, the two congresses of 1748 and 1818 are those which appear to have most vitality in the memories of the people, next to the crownings of their fifty Cæsars. At these congresses, kings and nobles met in the city of great memories, to perform such tricks of conjuration, such feats of deception, as had seldom been contemplated elsewhere by a wondering and profoundly edified people. What a satire upon the morality, excellencies, and decisive tendencies of war

was the congress of 1748, when, after years of legalized murdering and mutual rapine, each belligerent power showed the wisdom and justice of the cause for which it had "let slip the dogs of war," by making restitution of all, or nearly all, its conquests. Austria lost something, it is true; and Prussia was then, for the first time, raised to the condition of an independent power; but the ball of peace did not turn up under the cups of any of the magicians; and, thanks to Maria Theresa, the comedy of The Congress was followed by the bloody drama of The Seven Years' War. In this respect the sovereign meeting at Achen in the last century very nearly resembled, in its conclusion, that of Vienna in 1814. Of the subsequent congress in 1818, held over the grave of a dead monarch and round the empty throne of half a hundred of his descendants, we say nothing. The world was its spectators; and of these, one half were struck irrecoverably blind with the dazzling lights that were ignited for the nonce; and the other has not yet recovered from the effects of the laughing gas which was employed on the occasion. Alas! the laughing was hardly in accordance with the proverb which is too trite and threadbare to allow of quotation.

If, however, congresses in general only assemble to prove the folly, the inutility, and the wickedness of war, there was something in that which met within the walls of Vienna to make it an exception to the established rule. The long series of devastating struggles which preceded the great reunion of sovereigns could not be ascribed to the bad ambitions of both adversaries. One party had wantonly declared hostility; the other was reluctantly compelled, first to defend, and, in the course of victory, at length to become the aggressors. The thrones of the old European dynasties had been shaken by the hurricane of the French revolution. The divinity that was wont to hedge a king was no longer visible to the popular eye. Stripped of his purple, each monarch of an old house stood naked, as it were, in presence of the world-a very man and nothing more. The prestige of royalty, that had for so long a time held dazzling elevation, was debased and extinguished for ever. We may say for ever; since the old sentiments of loyalty and veneration for kings, though they still exist, exist in different degree to that which distinguished them in the last century. In saying this, we allude more particularly to the continental nations, which, ere they were reached by the hot breath of anarchy from France, were accustomed to look upon their sovereigns with a sort of religious awe. Viewing them as the vice-gerents of God, the people would have considered they had violated a religious duty, if they failed in the respect due to the representatives of the

Most High. We can have but faint conception now of the all but adoration that used to be paid by the German people to a German king. The literature of the period bears abundant testimony of the fact. The literature of the present day bears equal testimony to the change. In the old sentiment, if there was something of exaggeration, there was not a little worthy of admiration. The people trusted, and their princes rarely abused: even confidence misplaced was seldom followed by confidence withdrawn. In the new sentiment there is more of caution and worldliness. The people see nothing in the powers that be but as existing by accident: that they are ordained of God, never enters their thoughts, or enters but to be denied. The people have become watchful and suspicious, rather than submissive and trusting. If obedient, they are obedient by force of law, and not by persuasion of the Gospel. They no longer leave politics exclusively to the consideration and conduct of the chiefs of the state: they consider such chiefs but as their own agents, whose acts must be vigilantly scanned, examined, criticised, and condemned, if need be. In short, the French revolution created on the continent a permanent party against royalty; it made kings subject to the many-headed tyrant; it gave distrust for content, exchanged Volney for the Bible; and taught the people, while sitting at home, to presume to know "what is done 'the Capitol." A presumption of knowledge which has been so employed, and so abused, as to prove the correctness of Gray's assertion, that

"Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise."

But while emperors were stripped of their imperial purple and reduced to the level of common men, a common man stepped from the serried circle of his fellows, and, almost at a bound, raised himself to the degree of an emperor! Never had the jeu de Bascule of politics taken so extraordinary a turn. The son of a second-rate lawyer in a second-rate island, the adventurer with nothing round his family hearth but stagnation and starvation, shared by his hungry brothers and volatile sisters, the penniless wooer of fortune, with nought but his talent, his will, his sword, and the permission of God, to enable him to snatch greatness; this individual, stepping from a halfpay lieutenancy to the enjoyment of a self-fashioned imperial diadem, as much shocked the exclusive and reserved dignity of the German sovereigns, imperial, royal, ducal, electoral, and mediatized as much shocked their refined high-mightinesses by the parvenu odour which hung around him, as he disgusted the old school of German commanders, by defeating them contrary

to all the rules of war, and by gaining victories in the face of military maxims, rather than suffering himself to be vanquished according to established military principle.

The first cannon shot fired by Napoleon in his Italian campaign did not confine its devastations to the objects struck by it: its boom sounded the knell of a temporary death to the old recognised order of things-it crumbled the thrones which till then had continued to sustain a tottering dignity nodding to its fall-it announced the end of one epoch, and the opening of another-it smote universal Europe with mingled fear and ferocity fear at coming events too plainly shadowed forth, and a ferocity of purpose in determining to oppose their progress. If the battle of Monte Notte gave to the young general his title to nobility, it stripped half the royal houses of old Allemania of the possession of theirs. It revealed to the astounded and half-admiring people of the continent that the masters of Europe had found their superior. The scourge for forgotten sins had fallen upon the world, and swiftworking was its power of destruction. The dream of the youthful conqueror showed him Europe at his feet-a gigantic province of France; and his waking moments were devoted to the realization of the vision. His high-vaulting ambition overleaped itself, it is true; but, ere its entertainer fell, millions were robbed of life, and millions were left to live deprived of all that could make life endurable. From the outcast to the emperor from the houseless beggar to the owner of a throne every age, every degree, every sex, was made to feel the pressure of the times, and of him who ruled them. The fields of the continent were deluged in blood-hearths were made desolate― homes were destroyed; where thrones had stood, masses of their ruins alone marked the spot, and death and terror walked in horrible triumph among nations, working ills that no tongue could describe, and which no time, has yet, or can ever, fully repair. The bad ambition of one man, who went beyond his mission, caused this terrific change: from victory to victory his bloody car swept on, until he who sat in it got drunk with the glory of his career, and deemed that the power which, for wise purposes, allowed him success, neither could nor dared to visit him with defeat.

In these confined limits it were impossible to trace the course of the Corsican from his first battle gained to his all but annihilation on the ground of his victories. The armies of France who had lapped blood, and acquired liking for it in the French revolution, rolled forth as a torrent from its source, and swept before it all that was beautiful, useful, and sacred. Its impe

VOL, XVIII.—G G

tuosity was nobly, but fruitlessly, opposed. For a season it defied the best sustained opposition. A time, however, came when repeated defeat had taught the vanquished how to deal with injuries they had so long sustained; and soon did they better the instruction. The battle of nations fought at Leipzig, and the presence of an invaded foe within the frontiers of the invader sufficed to wipe out many a supposed disgrace, and to compensate for many a fancied humiliation. Destruction fell upon the destroyer. The assailer of thrones was mercilessly, and justly, flung from his own-the despoiler was despoiled-the victor was vanquished. He who had trodden on empires felt his own crumble away from beneath his feet. The smiter was smitten. The spoilt child of victory yielded more trophies than he had ever won. Stripped of his prestige, denuded of his authority, the banisher of joy was himself doomed to exile the wanton shedder of blood was condemned to its torturing memories. From the extreme limit of his conquests Europe pursued him with a yell, and where all had been triumph all was converted into defeat. The lion was followed into his lair; the multitude of his hunters, having dragged him into the light, raised him aloft in their arms for the world to gaze at, and, the spectacle concluded, hurled him into Elba, leaving to the breathless sovereigns of Europe the enviable occupation of creating something like order out of the dark and dismal chaos which yet environed them.

Difficult was the task and severe was the labour assigned them. They had to create rather than restore. They had to fuse old systems with new ideas; to adapt things to the times; to save what they could of the past, and make it assimilate as best they might with the present: to reproduce the ancient and venerable condition of European governments was manifestly neither possible nor desirable. And it is in this that we distinguish the great difference between the congress of Vienna and other meetings similarly constituted: the mission of the latter has generally been to place the adverse factions in the precise position which they enjoyed ere they became foes, to make each surrender his prizes or their equivalents, and to allow the triumphant and the humiliated party each to sing his respective Te Deum-one, in gratitude for the glories he had won; the other, in acknowledgment that his afflictions might have been

worse.

But the congress assembled at Vienna had another task. They stood amid the ruins of Europe-amid wrecks so great and confused that to attempt to form out of them the original edifices of which they had been a part, was beyond the power