Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845. Various
those vicissitudes. I saw Napoleon at the head of 500,000 men on the Niemen; I saw him reduced to 50,000 on the plains of Champagne; I saw him reduced to a brigade at Fontainebleau; I saw him a burlesque of empire at Elba; and I saw him an exile on board a British ship, departing from Europe to obscurity and his grave. These things may well reconcile inferior talents to the changes of fortune. But they should also teach nations, that the love of conquest is national ruin; and that there is a power which avenges the innocent blood. No country on earth requires that high moral more than France; and no country on earth has more bitterly suffered for its perversion. Napoleon was embodied France; the concentrated spirit of her wild ambition, of her furious love of conquest, of her reckless scorn of the sufferings and rights of mankind. Nobler principles have followed, under a wiser rule. But if France draws the sword again in the ambition of Napoleon, she will exhibit to the world only the fate of Napoleon. It will be her last war.
On my arrival in England, I found the public mind clouded with almost universal dejection. Pitt was visibly dying. He still held the nominal reins of government for some period; but the blow had been struck, and his sole honour now was to be, that, like the Spartan of old, he died on the field, and with his buckler on his arm. There are secrets in the distribution of human destinies, which have always perplexed mankind; and one of those is, why so many of the most powerful minds have been cut off in the midst of their career, extinguished at the moment when their fine faculties were hourly more essential to the welfare of science, of government, and of the general progress of society.
I may well comprehend that feeling, for it was my own. I saw Pitt laid in the grave; I looked down into the narrow bed where slept all that was mortal of the man who virtually wielded the whole supremacy of Europe. Yet how little can man estimate the future! Napoleon was in his glory, when Pitt was in his shroud. Yet how infinitely more honoured, and thus more happy, was the fate of him by whose sepulchre all that was noble and memorable in the living generation stood in reverence and sorrow, than the last hour of the prisoner of St Helena! Both were emblems of their nations. The Englishman, manly, pure, and bold, of unshaken firmness, of proud reliance on the resources of his own nature, and of lofty perseverence through good and through evil fortune. The foreigner, dazzling and daring, of singular intellectual vividness, and of a thirst of power which disdained to be slaked but at sources above the ambition of all the past warriors and statesmen of Europe. He was the first who dreamed of fabricating anew the old Roman sceptre, and establishing an empire of the world. His game was for a prodigious stake, and for a while he played it with prodigious fortune. He found the moral atmosphere filled with the floating elements of revolution; he collected the republican electricity, and discharged it on the cusps and pinnacles of the European thrones with terrible effect. But, from the moment when he had dissipated that charm, he lost the secret of his irresistible strength. As the head of the great republic, making opinion his precursor, calling on the old wrongs of nations to level his way, and marshaling the new-born hopes, the ancient injuries, and the ardent imaginations of the continental kingdoms to fight his battles; the world lay before him, with all its barriers ready to fall at the first tread of his horse's hoof. As an Emperor, he forged his own chain.
Napoleon, the chieftain of republicanism, might have revolutionized Europe; Napoleon, the monarch, narrowed his supremacy to the sweep of his sword. Like a necromancer weary of his art, he scattered the whole treasury of his magnificent illusions into "thin air;" flung away his creative wand for a sceptre; and buried the book of his magic "ten thousand fathom deep," to replace it only by the obsolete statutes of courts, and the weak etiquette of governments in decay. Fortunate for mankind that he committed this irrecoverable error, and was content to be the lord of France, instead of being the sovereign of opinion; for his nature was despotic, and his power must have finally shaped and massed itself into a stupendous tyranny. Still, he might have long influenced the fates, and long excited the awe and wonder, of Europe. We, too, might have worshipped his Star, and have forgotten the danger of the flaming phenomenon, in the rapidity and eccentricity of its course, as we saw it eclipsing the old luminaries in succession; until it touched our orbit, and visited us in conflagration.
It was said that Pitt died of a broken heart, in despair of the prospects of England. The defeat of Austerlitz was pronounced his death-blow. What thoughts may cluster round the sleepless pillow, who shall tell? But no man knew England better; none had a bolder faith in her perseverance and principle; none had more broadly laid the foundations of victory in national honour. I shall never be driven into the belief that William Pitt despaired of his country.
He died in the vigour of his genius, in the proudest struggle of the empire, in the midst of the deepest trial which for a thousand years had demanded all the faculties of England. Yet, what man within human recollection had lived so long, if we are to reckon life not by the calendar but by triumphs? What minister of England, what minister of Europe, but himself, was the head of his government for three-and-twenty years? What man had attained so high an European rank? What mind had influenced so large an extent of European interests? What name was so instinctively pronounced by every nation, as the first among mankind? To have earned distinctions like these, was to have obtained all that time could give. Not half a century in years, Pitt's true age was patriarchal.
I was now but a spectator. My connexion with public life was broken off. Every name with which I had been associated was swept away; and I stood like a man flung from ship-wreck upon a shore, where every face which he met was that of a stranger. I was still in Parliament, but I felt a loathing for public exertions. From habit, I had almost identified office with the memorable men whom I had seen governing so long; and the new faces, the new declamation, and the new principles, which the ministerial change brought before me nightly, startled my feelings even less as new than as incongruous. I admitted the ability, the occasional intelligence, and perhaps even the patriotism of the cabinet; but in those reveries, (the natural refuge from a long debate,) memory so often peopled the Treasury Bench with the forms of Pitt and his distinguished coadjutors, and so completely filled my ear with his sonorous periods and high-toned principles, that when I was roused to the reality, I felt as those who have seen some great performer in one of Shakspeare's characters, until no excellence of his successor can embody the conception once more.
I retired from the tumult of London, and returned to tastes which I had never wholly forgotten; taking a small residence within a few miles of this centre of the living world, and devoting my leisure to the enjoyments of that life, which, in the purest days of man, was given to him as the happiest, "to dress the garden, and keep it." Clotilde in all her tastes joined with mine, or rather led them, with the instinctive elegance of a female mind, accomplished in every grace of education. We read, wrote, walked, talked, and pruned our rose-trees and gathered our carnations and violets, together. She had already given me those pledges, which, while they increase the anxiety, also increase the affection, of wedded life. The education of our children was a new source of interest. They were handsome and healthy. Their little sports, the growth of their young perceptions, and the freshness of their ideas, renewed to us both all the delights of society without their exhaustion; and when, after returning from a day spent in the noise and bustle of London, I reached my rustic gate, heard the cheerful voices of the little population which rushed down the flowery avenue to cling upon my neck; and stood at the door of my cottage, with my arm round the waist of my beautiful and fond wife, breathing the evening fragrance of a thousand blooms, and enjoying the cool air, and the purple glories of the sky – I often wondered why men should seek for happiness in any other scene; and felt gratitude, not the less sincere for its being calm and solemn, to the Giver of a lot so nearly approaching to human fulness of joy.
But the world rolls on, let who will slumber among its roses. The political world was awoke by a thunder-clap. Fox died. He was just six months a minister! Such is ambition, such is the world. He died, like Pitt, in the zenith of his powers, with his judgment improved and his passions mitigated, with the noblest prospects of public utility before his eyes, and the majestic responsibilities of a British minister assuming their natural rank in his capacious mind. The times, too, were darkening; and another "lodestar" was thus stricken from the national hemisphere, at the moment when the nation most wanted guidance. The lights which remained were many; but they were vague, feeble, and scattered. The "leader of the starry host" was gone.
I cannot trust myself to speak of this distinguished man; for I was no Foxite. I regarded his policy in opposition as the pleadings