will;-until at length there will rise up against them a moft puiffant military chieftain of low birth, who will have conceded to him a fellowship with the other fovereigns of the earth, and will finally be conftituted the head of all. This man will harass the civilized world with an infupportable defpotifm, he will confound and commix all things fpiritual and temporal. He will form plans and preparations of the most execrable and facrilegious nature. He will be for ever reftleffly turning over new fchemes in his imagination, in order that he may fix the imperial power over all in his own name and poffeffion. He will change the former laws, he will fanction a code of his own, he will contaminate, pillage, lay wafte and maffacre. At length, when he has fucceeded in the change of names and titles, and in the transfer of the feat of empire, there will follow a confufion and perturbation of the human race; then will there be for a while an era of horror and abomination, during which no man will enjoy his life in quietness.*

INTERPOSE this effay as an hiftorical comment on the words "mimic and caricaturift of Charlemagne," as applied to the defpot, whom fince the time that the words were firft printed, we have, thank Heaven! fucceeded in encaging. The motto contains one of the moft ftriking inftances of an uninfpired prophecy fulfilled even in many of its minutia, that I recollect ever to have met with : and it is hoped, that as a curiofity it will reconcile my readers to its unufual length. But though my chief motive was that of relieving, by the variety of an hiftorical parallel, the series of argument on this most important of all fubjects, the communi

This tranflation has expreffions referring to fome words inferted by the author in the Latin quotation in the previous editions.-Ed.

cability of truth, yet the effay is far from being a digreffion. Having given utterance to quicquid in rem tam maleficam indignatio dolorque dictarent, concerning the mischiefs of a lawless prefs, I held it an act of justice to give a portrait no less lively of the excess to which the remorseless ambition of a government might go in accumulating its oppreffions in the one instance before the discovery of printing, and in the other during the fuppreffion of its freedom.

I have translated the following from a voluminous German work, Michael Ignaz Schmidt's Hiftory of the Germans, from Charles the Great to Conrade I.; in which this extract forms the conclufion of the second chapter of the third book. The late tyrant's clofe imitation of Charlemagne was fufficiently evidenced by his affumption of the iron crown of Italy, by his imperial coronation with the presence and authority of the Holy Father; by his imperial robe embroidered with bees in order to mark him as a fucceffor of Pepin, and even by his oftentatious revocation of Charlemagne's grants to the Bishop of Rome. But that the differences might be felt likewife, I have prefaced the tranflation with the few following obfervations.

Let it be remembered then, that Charlemagne, for the greater part, created for himself the means of which he availed himself; that his very education was his own work, and that unlike Peter the Great, he could find no affiftants out of his own realm; that the unconquerable courage and heroic

difpofitions of the nations he conquered, supplied a proof pofitive of real fuperiority, indeed the fole pofitive proof of intellectual power, in a warrior : for how can we measure force but by the refiftance to it? But all was prepared for Buonaparte; Europe weakened in the very heart of all human strength, namely, in moral and religious principle, and at the fame time accidentally deftitute of any one great or commanding mind: the French people, on the other hand, ftill restless from revolutionary fanaticism; their civic enthusiasm already paffed into military paffion and the ambition of conqueft; and alike by disgust, terror, and characteristic unfitness for freedom, ripe for the reception of a defpotism. Add too, that the main obftacles to an unlimited system of conquest, and the pursuit of universal monarchy had been cleared away for him by his pioneers the Jacobins, namely, the influence of the great land-holders, of the privileged and of the commercial claffes. Even the naval fucceffes of Great Britain, by destroying the trade, rendering useless the colonies, and almost annihilating the navy of France, were in some respects fubfervient to his designs by concentrating the powers of the French empire in its armies, and supplying them out of the wrecks of all other employments, fave that of agriculture. France had already approximated to the formidable state so prophetically described by Sir James Steuart, in his Political Economy, in which the population should confift chiefly of foldiers and peasantry: at least the interests of

no other classes were regarded. The great merit of Buonaparte has been that of a skilful steersman, who with his boat in the most violent storm still keeps himself on the fummit of the waves, which not he, but the winds had raised. I will now proceed to my translation.

"That Charles was a hero, his exploits bear evidence. The fubjugation of the Lombards, protected as they were by the Alps, by fortresses and fortified towns, by numerous armies, and by a great name; of the Saxons, fecured by their favage refoluteness, by an untameable love of freedom, by their defert plains and enormous forefts, and by their own poverty; the humbling of the Dukes of Bavaria, Aquitania, Bretagne, and Gascony; proud of their ancestry as well as of their ample domains; the almost entire extirpation of the Avars, fo long the terror of Europe; are affuredly works which demanded a courage and a firmness of mind such as Charles only poffeffed.

"How great his reputation was, and this too beyond the limits of Europe, is proved by the embaffies sent to him out of Persia, Palestine, Mauritania, and even from the Khalifs of Bagdad. If at the present day an embaffy from the Black or Cafpian Sea comes to a prince on the Baltic, it is not to be wondered at, fince fuch are now the political relations of the four quarters of the world, that a blow which is given to any one of them is felt more or less by all the others. Whereas in the times of Charlemagne, the inhabitants in one of

the known parts of the world scarcely knew what was going on in the reft. Nothing but the extraordinary, all-piercing, report of Charles's exploits could bring this to pafs. His greatness, which set the world in aftonishment, was likewife, without doubt, that which begot in the Pope and the Romans the firft idea of the re-establishment of their empire.

"It is true, that a number of things united to make Charles a great man- - favourable circumstances of time, a nation already disciplined to warlike habits, a long life, and the consequent acquifition of experience, fuch as no one poffeffed in his whole realm. Still, however, the principal means of his greatness Charles found in himself. His great mind was capable of extending its attention to the greatest multiplicity of affairs. In the middle of Saxony he thought on Italy and Spain, and at Rome he made provifions for Saxony, Bavaria, and Pannonia. He gave audience to the ambaffadors of the Greek emperor and other potentates, and himself audited the accounts of his own farms, where every thing was entered even to the number of the eggs. Bufy as his mind was, his body was not less in one continued state of motion. Charles would fee into every thing himself, and do every thing himself, as far as his powers extended: and even this it was, too, which gave to his undertakings fuch force and energy.

"But with all this the government of Charles was the government of a conqueror, that is splen