spoiled by keeping. If Titus complained with so much bitterness, that he had lost a day to virtue, what must not some modern friends to mankind feel, when they reflect that they have lost so many years in the execution of their just and beneficent plans!—In spite of Mr. Southey's reasoning in his Carmen Triumphiale, about joining "the avengers of mankind," we conceive that the wheel has gone once round already, "full circle home," and that now it had better stand still.
But it may be said, do we mean to apply these remarks to Bonaparte? As far as relates to any merits of the war-faction. It was they who implicated him with the cause of the French people, as "the child and champion of Jacobinism." We cannot express our opinion better than in the words of Mr. Whitbread, "that England had made Bonaparte, and he had undone himself." He was the creature of the Pitt-school. Was the iron scourge which he has held over Europe put into his hands by the peace-party? Were the battles of Austerlitz and Jena—were the march to Vienna, the possession of Berlin, the invasion of Spain, the expedition to Russia, and the burning of Moscow, the consequences of the signing or of the breaking of the treaty of Amiens?
The author of the letters of Vetus, (who we suppose is silenced by The Times, for asserting that the Bourbons have no more a lawful right to the throne of France, at this moment, than the Stuarts had to the throne of England twenty years after the Revolution of 1688,) is of opinion, that this war is merely national, merely the old grudge between the two countries; and that the Bourbons, the Republic, and Bonaparte, are equally hostile to England, and we to them. In this, as in most things else, our opinion is the opposite of his. There is only one period of the history of the two countries, which, reversed, furnishes an exact counterpart to the present contest, both in its avowed principles and secret motives—we mean the war waged by Louis XIV. against this country and its allies, for nearly as long a period after the
