a life of Cromwell, in some respects the great prototype of Napoleon, with strict impartiality, and the same causes which still make this so difficult in the case of the Protector, will long operate in the case of Buonaparte. Another difficulty, as regards the latter, arises from the manner in which history has been falsified and perverted in the works with which the press in France has lately teemed, under the name of Memoirs; purporting, of course, to have been written by the persons whose names they bear, but which are in many, if not in most instances, gross fabrications; and yet are frequently written with so much tact and talent, the anecdotes and opinions being so cleverly in keeping with the character of the supposed author, and with the few things in the work which are authentic, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the true from the false; others, such as the Memoirs of Madame Campan,' and 'Madame de Genlis,'-the latter at least really written by the ostensible author,-being perfect fabrications of facts for a given purpose, and well calculated to answer it. Of the Memoirs of Bourienne' again, who was the private secretary of Napoleon, and whose supposed work for that reason has been quoted as high authority, it is very doubtful whether one word was ever written by him; and we much question whether any history of Napoleon founded on such documents as are just at present accessible, will stand the test of time, when state papers, and other authorities of the kind, from which only authentic history can be compiled, shall be brought to bear upon the subject. For the mere purposes of detailing his campaigns, and the outward effects of his government on the surface of European society, perhaps materials sufficiently authentic may already be procured; but the world, at least we hope so, is becoming tired of hero-worship, and more and more inclined to look quite through the deeds of men,' back to their motives, and on to their effects; and to draw from them those practical inferences which all history suggests, and but for which it would be useless. After all, however, the lessons which history teaches, though valuable, are few, are much alike in all ages, and might be learned as well from former times as from our own, if men were not more prone to attend to the present than to the past, and merely to use their eyes than to exercise their understandings. It is this propensity, we suppose, which renders it necessary to repeat the lesson, till the world itself like individual man, by the time it shall be verging on old age, shall have acquired a little wisdom, and shall rate the great disturbers of mankind at their real value. When that time arrives, there may be peace on earth-but not till then.

This part of the Pictorial History contains the account of the

most celebrated war in which this country was ever engaged, and of the exploits of our great commanders by sea and land. The general course and most of the details of these affairs are so well known, that it is needless to enter on any description of them here; we dismiss this portion of the volume, therefore, with merely stating, that it is well and clearly, and sometimes powerfully written; and often gives a better notion of the events on which it treats, than most other works that have been written on the subject.

In the meanwhile, whether from exhaustion or from the dawning of that wisdom of which we have before spoken, the extraordinary course of war and bloodshed which rendered Europe, from the Tagus to the Moskwa, one vast slaughterhouse, has already been succeeded by as extraordinary a peace; so general as has scarcely been seen on earth since the advent of our Lord; and so long, that it is almost becoming a mark of age to have lived in times of war. The efforts of ambition have been forced by circumstances to take a new direction. Population has increased to such an extent, that no man can sit still and live. Everything is positive and active; all literary men write; none (except poor reviewers) read; we have no time to stand or walk, but are projected at the rate of cannon-balls. Our grandfathers made their wills before taking a journey from Bristol to London; now, they would scarcely have time to take their lunch, before they were at home again.

Between the stagnant times of George the First and Second, when everybody was asleep with nobody to wake them, and our day when everybody must be awake, and nobody goes to sleep at all;--from that time when art and science were in leading strings, with nobody to lead them, to the present, when everybody leads and nobody will follow, except upon a railway;between those times and ours, the latter half especially, of the reign of George the Third, may be looked upon as a transition period. To say nothing of the tremendous struggle in which all Europe was engaged for the preservation of its political existence, the universal mind of man appears to have been roused, and urged in every possible direction. In England, especially, a diversity of pursuit might have been anticipated. The mortal strife in which the continental nations were engaged, afforded little leisure for the cultivation of letters, or the arts of civilized life. The erection of national monuments or buildings, the creations of art, the productions of learning, would give but little satisfaction, when the next campaign might possibly destroy them all, or sweep away all such as were removable, to the museums, or libraries, of a foreign state. In our country these hostile causes were not in operation. Our

part—no mean one-in the grand contest, consisted in finding employment for the common enemy in other countries; and in supplying the sinews of war to other states who could not find them for themselves. Our countrymen at home, at distance from the scenes of strife, were left at liberty to direct their energies to other and more peaceful occupations.

Before, however, we enter on a brief account of the progress of the people, and of the arts and sciences among them during the period to which the volume before us refers, it may not be amiss to lay before the reader a slight sketch of the pecuniary sacrifices which the nation made in the progress of the continental war; as illustrating the vast resources of our country, and the lavish and unsparing use which was made of them, by Mr. Pitt, and the 'forcible feebles' of his party who succeeded him. It is not our intention to enter on the discussion of the politics of the times; we have our opinions of course, but at present we confine ourselves to facts. The evils which have resulted from the policy of the Pitt school are obvious, and have been felt with sufficient severity. What other evilsgreater or less-we may have escaped by the line of policy which our rulers adopted, we cannot now decide.

'Pitt had already laid his hands upon nearly every thing out of which money could be wrung for the public service by the utmost skill of financial chemistry; all that could be done was to carry some of his processes somewhat further; it was impossible to skin the flint stones, but the sheep might be shorn a little closer; and, accordingly, scarcely a year passed in which this was not done. The entire annual produce of the new taxes enacted in each year of the war, down to the first overthrow of Buonaparte, was calculated as follows, at the times when they were proposed :- £4,000,000 in 1802; £12,500,000 in 1803; £1,000,000 in 1804; £1,560,000 in 1805; £6,000,000 in 1806; £200,000 in 1808; £1,617,600 in 1811; £1,495,000 in 1812; £980,000 in 1813. Down to this last date no taxes, or none of any significance, had been repealed; so that, according to this account, the entire taxation of 1813 must have exceeded that of 1801 by more than £30,000,000 sterling. And so it actually did. (p. 648). And in some of these cases the Irish budget was not included.'

But, in addition to these amounts, the following sums were also raised by loans and exchequer bills, beyond the amount of the national debt redeemed, in each of the fifteen years from 1802 to 1816 inclusive-£14,638,254, making the total revenue £51,006,403; in 1802, £8,752,761, making in all, £47,862,153. in 1803; and so on, with slight variations, down to the years 1813 and 1814, for which the gross amounts were respectively

£108,397,645 and £105,698,106. became gradually smaller.

From this time the sums

To a well regulated mind, it can be no consolation under suffering to find that others suffer with it; but a word or two on the internal state of France at the time when we were suffering under the immense load of taxation above described, may serve to show at what a cost to his own people the ruler of that country was willing to carry on his plans of ambition and revenge. In the year 1810 a Mr. Walsh, a member of the American legation at Paris, published a work on the genius of the French government, including a view of the taxation of the empire; from which volume we condense a few particulars. All confidence in the government appeared to be lost; the legislative body had no control over the disposal of the revenue ;—a yearly budget was produced, in which the amount of the real receipts was doubled: and upon which no reliance whatever was placed by any well informed member of the community.' 'I have,' says Mr. W., 'carefully compared the list of objects taxed in England, particularly those which fall under the excise, with the catalogue of France; and have found that the French government have omitted none, which by any possibility can be rendered productive. In England they have studiously avoided the imposition of such taxes as might clog the industry, or trench too far on the necessities of the people. In France these considerations appear to have had no weight; while at the same time the proportions observed in England for the alleviation of the lower classes, are there wholly disregarded. No comparison can be instituted, as to the moderation and lenity with which the numerous and complicated taxes of both countries are levied.' Many taxes were also imposed in addition to those known in this country, and all of the heaviest kind. On gateways, chimneys, and doors, in addition to windows; the droit des patentes, a tax on persons engaged in trades and professions; a sort of land tax, which was levied with the same vexatious investigation and exposures as our income tax, fixed by government at five per cent. on the income, and from which no relief can be obtained, except on the condition that the person complaining shall point out some other estate within his district that has been undervalued. Heavy duties were also levied on all legal instruments, on extracts from registers of births and deaths, even on judicial proceedings. No landed proprietor could cut down his own timber, without giving six months notice, and obtaining permission of government. Many other most vexatious imposts were levied, which we cannot enumerate; and the effects were the decay of the great towns, the general decline of agriculture and manufactures, of commerce and internal trade. Add to

these the dominion of a military police, the oppressions of the soldiery, and above all the miseries of the conscription. It was the vain attempt to carry out his system wherever his power extended, that roused against Napoleon not only the crowned heads, but the people also, of all the European states, and which began and consummated his downfall.

The latter half of the reign of George III. was not more distinguished by the tremendous political convulsions, which took place within it, than for the great revival of literature, which, as we have said, was probably produced by that awakening of the human mind, resulting from the agitations of the physical and moral world. The author of this section of the history seems half inclined to think, that the impressiveness of the great chronological event formed by the termination of one century and the commencement of another, had been wont to act with an awakening and fructifying power upon literary genius in this island,' and that nature in this, as in other things, has her times of production, and of comparative rest and inactivity.' This latter conclusion might almost have been suspected à priori, for we know that such is the case in many parts of the material universe; and there appears to be a remarkable similarity in all the operations of nature, so far as we have been able to trace them; and therefore, probably, much farther. But whether true or false in theory, we know that it is, and ever has been, true in fact. As to the effects of ending and beginning centuries, and the undoubted truth that of the three last great sunbursts of our literature, the first, making what has been called the Elizabethan age of our dramatic and other poetry, threw its splendour over the last quarter of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century; the second, famous as the Augustan age of Anne, brightened the earlier years of the eighteenth ;' and that the nineteenth century was ushered in by the third;' we are much more inclined to attribute these awakenings to such causes as those at which we have glanced ourselves, and to which, indeed, the writer of the history at length refers them, than to any influence pertaining to time and season, as such, or to feelings and reflexions suggested by them.

It is also,' says the author, to be observed, that on each of these three occasions the excitement appears to have come to us, in part, from a foreign literature which had undergone a similar reawakening, or put forth a new life and vigour, shortly before our own; in the Elizabethan age, the contagion or impulse was caught from the literature of Italy; in the age of Anne, from that of France; in the present period from that of Germany.'-p. 697.