A.D. 1805.]

Moniteur, and also stated in opening the senate at Paris, that a "tempest had deprived him of some few ships, after a battle imprudently entered into "-and that was all the public notice he took of this ruinous catastrophe of Trafalgar-yet, amongst those immediately around him, he indulged in the most violent language against Villeneuve, declaring that he had disobeyed the orders sent to himorders which would have insured victory. He was the more exasperated, because, notwithstanding all his exertions to keep concealed the truth, it was every day becoming more known through the return of the soldiers and sailors from Spain, and from the active endeavours of the royalists in France. Napoleon would not allow Villeneuve to approach Paris, and this is his account of the end of the admiral :"At Rennes, on the 26th of April, 1806, on his way from England, Villeneuve put an end to himself! When taken prisoner, and conveyed to England, he was so much grieved at his defeat that he studied anatomy, in order to destroy himself. For this purpose, he bought some anatomical plates of the heart, and compared them with his own body, in order to ascertain the exact situation of that organ. On his arrival in France, I ordered that he should remain at Rennes, and not proceed to Paris. Villeneuve, afraid of being tried by a court-martial, determined to destroy himself, and accordingly took his plates of the heart, and compared them with his breast. Exactly in the centre of the plate he made a mark with a large pin, then fixed the pin, as near as he could judge, in the same spot in his own breast, shoved it in to the head, penetrated his heart, and expired. He need not have done it, as he was a brave man, though possessed of no talent."

This story is altogether too absurd. A man accustomed to battles and death was under no necessity to study anatomy in order to destroy himself. A pistol bullet through his head was a much likelier means of suicide than a pin, and all this adaptation. Accordingly, the public, bearing in mind the deaths of Pichegru and captain Wright, formed its own conclusions about the matter. It felt that Villeneuve had the strongest interest in telling a very different story of the battle of Trafalgar to that which Buonaparte had given, his story would have confirmed that of the returned soldiers and sailors, and have been identical with that which was now circulating all the world over. What rendered the public conviction stronger of the real nature of Villeneuve's death was, that not this version only, but a number of others were spread abroad. By one, he shot himself; by another, he stabbed himself with a dagger; by a third, he fell on his own sword!

In England, the news of the death of Nelson nearly neutralised the rejoicing for the most important victory which accompanied it. His brother, a country clergyman, who succeeded to his title, was raised to the dignity of an earl. Parliament voted a hundred thousand pounds for the purchase of an estate, and granted ten thousand pounds to each of his sisters. But no regard was ever paid to his dying request in behalf of lady Hamilton, who lived in poverty, and lies in an unknown grave at St. Pierre, near Calais, nor to his daughter; neither was his anticipation of a tomb in Westminster Abbey realised, but he was assigned one in St. Paul's Cathedral, and his remains were attended thither with the usual state.

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A new and vigorous campaign was this year carried on in India by general, now lord Lake, against the Mahrattas. Holkar had refused to enter into amicable arrangements with the English at the same time as Scindia and the rajah of Berar, but had continued to strengthen his army, and now assumed so menacing an attitude, that lord Lake and general Frazer were sent to bring him to terms or to action. They found him strongly posted near the fortress of Deeg, in the midst of bogs, tanks, and topes, and formidably defended by artillery. On the 13th of November, 1804, general Frazer attacked them, notwithstanding, and defeated them, but was killed himself in the action, and had six hundred and forty-three men killed and wounded; for the fire of round, grape, and chain-shot by the Mahrattas was tremendous. The English captured, however, eighty-seven pieces of cannon of splendid European workmanship. On the 17th, lord Lake fell on Holkar's cavalry near Ferruckabad, commanded by Holkar himself, and thoroughly routed it, very nearly making capture of Holkar. He retreated into the Bhurtpore territory, the rajah of that district having joined him. Lord Lake determined to follow him, and drove him thence, reducing the forts in that country. He had first, however, to make himself master of the fortress of Deeg, and this proved a desperate affair. Still the garrison, consisting of troops partly belonging to Holkar and partly to the rajah of Bhurtpore, evacuated it on Christmas-day, leaving behind them a great quantity of cannon and ammunition. On the 1st of January, 1805, lord Lake, accompanied by colonel Monson, marched into the territory of Bhurtpore, and, on the 3rd, sate down before its fortress, one of the strongest places in India. It was situated amid lakes and morasses, about thirty miles from Agra, and was difficult of approach, as well as most skilfully fortified. It had a numerous garrison, and abundance of artillery. It was surrounded by a broad ditch, more than eight feet deep in water. Lord Lake cannonaded it till a breach was made, and then a storming party was pushed across the ditch on rafts, and endeavoured to take the fortress by escalade. They were driven back, with three hundred English and two hundred sepoys killed. The cannonade continued, and, as fresh breaches appeared, fresh assaults were made, but with the same slaughterous and abortive results. The Mahrattas secured the breaches by strong stockades within till they could repair them. On the 18th of January, majorgeneral Smith arrived from Agra with three battalions of sepoys and a hundred Europeans, and Ishmail Beeg deserted from Holkar with five hundred horse. But these advantages were counterbalanced by Meer Khan arriving with a strong force from Bundelcund to assist Holkar.

On the 21st of January another great breach was made, and another attempt to carry the place by assault; but it was repelled by a terrible slaughter, upwards of six hundred men being killed or wounded. At the same time, Meer Khan, with eight thousand horse, endeavoured to cut off a great train of camels and bullocks bringing up provisions, but was defeated, as were the united forces of Meer Khan, Holkar, and the rajah of Bhurtpore, in a similar attempt to intercept another provision train on its way from Agra. In order to compel Lake to raise the siege of Bhurtpore, Meer Khan made an incursion with his own cavalry, and a power

to renounce all connection with the enemies of England; to pay by instalments twenty lacs of Furruckabad rupees; to surrender a portion of his territory, and deliver one of his sons as a hostage for the fulfilment of his engagements. This was settled on the 10th of April, and, on the 21st, lord Lake went in quest of Scindiah and Holkar, who had united their forces. At his approach, they retreated towards Ajmeer. As the rainy season was approaching, lord Lake returned and quartered his troops at Agra, Mutra, and the neighbouring towns. Lord Wellesley was now superseded in the government of India by lord Cornwallis, who was averse to the system of extensive annexation which lord Wellesley had pursued. But his own health was failing, and as he ascended the country in order to confer with lord Lake on his future policy, he died at Gazepoor, near Benares, having returned to India only three months. Sir George Barlow assumed the direction of affairs till the appointment of a new governor-general; and, as lord Lake was of opinion that there could be no security till Holkar and Scindiah were driven over the Indus, it was resolved to carry out that object. Scindiah, however, came in and made peace, and Holkar went northward, boasting that he would cross the Indus, and then return with a new avalanche of Sikhs and Affghans, and sweep away the British forces. He managed to elude major-general Jones and colonel Ball, who marched from different quarters to intercept him; and, to prevent him arousing the Sikhs to arms, lord Lake marched rapidly after him with the cavalry, and a portion of the infantry. He reached the country of the Sikhs, who professed themselves friendly, and, crossing the Sutledjh, he pushed on with wonderful celerity into the Punjab, and, being joined by a reinforcement, under colonel Burn, he still advanced, and reached the banks of the Beas river, the Hyphasis of Alexander the Great, where he and his Macedonians halted, and turned back towards their far-off country. On the banks of this river, a tributary of the Indus, the British troops beheld above them the mighty ranges of the Himalaya, and the distant, snow-clad summits of the ancient Imaus. Around them were vast pine-woods clothing the slopes, and enchanting valleys, with numerous villages and temples, and the ruined structures of past ages. The natives gazed on them with as much wonder as their ancestors, more than two thousand years before, had gazed on the Macedonian army; but they proved friendly, and soon flocked in with provisions and fruits. Holkar lay encamped betwixt them and the city of Lahore, and lord Lake was preparing to reach him, or drive him across the Hydrastes, when he found himself, like Alexander, arrested

in his march.

desirous of entering into treaty with us, but the Sikhs, who wished both him and us away, refused all aid to Holkar, except to mediate for him. Even then he hung back, and made great difficulties about the conditions; but lord Lake at length informed him that, unless the treaty was signed by a certain day, he would cross the Hyphasis, and advance to attack him. This brought him to, and, on the 7th of January, 1806, the treaty was duly signed by him. By it Holkar renounced all claims on Poonah and Bundelcund, and, indeed, on any territory on the northern bank of the Chumbul, as well as ali claims on the British government and its allies. On our part, we agreed to restore to him, eighteen months after the treaty, Chandore, Galnauh, and other forts and districts south of the Taptee and Godavery, provided he fulfilled his engagements, remained peaceful, and did not molest the territories of the company and its allies, nor admit Surjee-Row-Gautka into his service. By the treaty with Scindiah, which was completed on the 23rd of November, that of Surjee Anjengaum, made by general Wellesley, was confirmed: to restore to him Gwalior and Gohud, with the right to resume them in case he violated the treaty. The river Chumbul was made his boundary. In exchange for certain jaghires, amounting to fifteen laca of rupees annually, which had been granted to some of his officers by the former treaty, he received an annual pension of four lacs of rupees for himself, a jaghire, worth two lacs of rupees, for his wife, and another, worth one lac, for his daughter. As for his father-in-law, Surjee-Row-Gautkaa man most hostile to the English, and who was supposed to have stimulated both Scindiah and Holkar to their late war-he was bound, like Holkar, not to admit him again to his counsels or service. No interference was made with his conquests between the rivers Chumbul and Taptee, nor with his arrangements with his tributary chiefs in Mewar and Marwar; but, on the other hand, he was required not to take into his service any Europeans, without consent of the British. French officers, indeed, who had served under M. Perron, were found to have directed the defence of the hill forts in this campaign, greatly to our damage.

These treaties were regarded by lord Lake, Sir John Malcolm-who had to negotiate them-and many men of eminence in Indian affairs, as based on a policy which could not last; that there could be no quiet in Hindustan, so long as the restless Mahrattas and Pindarries were not broken up, nor till the Indus was made the boundary of our Indian empire towards the north-west. We shall see that a few more years justified their foresight. These treaties, however, having, for the present, restored peace to the north, lord Lake, after giving a grand review of the army on the banks of the Hyphasis, to impress the Sikhs with a sense of our

and, in February, 1807, quitted his command in India, few commanders having rendered more brilliant services in that part of our empire, or left behind him more sincere esteem and admiration.

Parliament opened gloomily on the 21st of January, 1806. The total failure of Pitt's new continental coalition, the surrender of Ulm, the battle of Austerlitz, the retreat of Austria into peace with Napoleon, and of Russia into her northern snows, Germany. Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and

Belgium nearly all continuing prostrate at the feet of Buonaparte, notwithstanding all the money spent afresh to stimulate the continental nations to do their own business, and take care of themselves-were killing Pitt, and had driven the king again to the verge of madness. Pitt had sought for renovation, in the autumn, at Bath; but its salutary waters and atmosphere had failed to repair the ravages in a constitution destroyed by rich dinners, late hours, hard drinking, and the mortification to a proud spirit which the utter failure of his great and absurd continental system had produced. He was dying at Putney as the house met, and the king was not in a condition to open the session personally. The royal speech, read by a commissioner, referred, with just pride, to the great victory of Trafalgar, and had but little to say on the defeat of all our endeavours on the continent. The opposition determined to move an amendment on the address on the point of this false and ruinous continental policy; but this was prevented by the announcement of the death of Pitt on the 24th, two days after the opening of parliament. Mr. Lascelles gave notice of a motion for a public funeral in Westminster Abbey. Fox moved that this question should be postponed till after the discussion on the address, which was considered by Pitt's friends as a great want of generosity in Fox; but it must be remembered that Fox and his party had, from first to last, protested against Pitt's policy as erroneous in theory, and mischievous in all its tendencies; as ruinous to this country, by its boundless interference with the affairs of the continental nations. The discussion on the amendment was therefore, in truth, a discussion on the real merits of Pitt-on his real services or dis-services to this country. It might not be generous, but, in a national point of viewthe only view in which parliament had a right to entertain it-it was a just one, which, in government, is the more legitimate. The amendment was, of course, overruled, and it was voted, on the 27th of January, by a majority of two hundred and fifty-eight against eighty-nine, that Pitt should be buried in Westminster Abbey; which accordingly took place, the royal dukes, the archbishop of Canterbury, eight bishops, a great number of peers, and about a hundred members of the house of commons attending.

A second question regarding the late minister became immediately necessary. He had died greatly in debt. It was one of the best qualities of Pitt, that he never had a love of money, or an ambition to create a great estate at the expense of the country, like too many statesmen. On the other hand, he was perfectly incapable of managing his own affairs, whilst he thought himself capable of managing those of the whole world. In both cases, the only result of his plans was huge debt, and nothing more. At an early period of Pitt's ministerial career, though a bachelor, he was so hopelessly in debt, that his friend, Robert Smith, afterwards baron Carrington, had looked into his affairs, and declared that, of all scenes of domestic robbery by servants, and wild charges by tradesmen, he had never witnessed anything to compare with it. The financial management of his own income and that of the nation were just on a par in Pitt's case. He let his own money go like water, and he would have flung any quantity of the nation's property away on his quixotic scheme of prop

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ping up the thoroughly rotten and hopeless condition of the continental governments. A strong push was now made by such of Pitt's creditors as had advanced money to him, to be repaid by the nation. In this endeavour, none were more eager than his great friends and relatives, who had been enabled by him to draw a hundred-fold from the nation what they had lent him. Wilberforce, however, proposed that they should not only forego their individual claims, but should contribute each a moderate sum towards the raising of forty thousand pounds, which would pay his tradesmen; but here the great relatives and friends became dumb and motionless. Spencer Perceval offered a thousand pounds, and one or two others made some offers; but the appeal was vain, and a motion was made by Mr. Cartwright, on the 3rd of February, that the nation should pay this sum. This was carried at once.

The genius and services of Pitt to this country have been greatly overrated. That he was a man of great and persevering energies, and of a large amount of talent and eloquence, is certain; but he was of a cold, proud, self-deifying, imperious temperament, without either the deep insight or the comprehensive grasp of genius. He did not perceive that there was a movement going on in society; the nascent progress of more genuine ideas of national government, and therefore all his efforts were bent to maintain things as they were; to keep up the old notions of the balance of power, and to bolster on the worm-eaten theories of corrupt old dynasties those persons and principles that both God and man had condemned, and which, therefore, no minister, however able, no nation, however wealthy or warlike, could uphold. The whole mass of social and political life were in a state of transition, but Pitt and his colleagues were too superficial to perceive this; and they went on pledging the whole power of the nation, and the property of posterity, to arrest a movement as irresistible as that of the earth and the planets around her. Never was there so unfortunate a phrase as that long bepraised one of George Canning— "The heaven-born minister, who weathered the storm." If ever there was a minister particularly earth-born, of the earth, earthy, it was Pitt. Of that glance and spirit of heaven, which penetrate to the heart of things, and perceive the real and the eternal under the dying forms of the transitory and merely conventional, he was entirely destitute. His whole political theory was a mistake; his whole strenuous contest against that tempest from on high, which was shaking out of the nations their carious components, as a whirlwind rends from the forest its dead boughs, was a battle against nature and the onward doctrines of man, as hopeless as that of the Titans against Olympus. The system of prince Metternich, in our time, was long eulogised as the system of a profound statesman. It was the shallowest of all shallow systems-a system of obstruction, like that of damming up a river which, in its ever-accumulating motumment, will ultimately sweep all obstacles before it. We behold the results in the condition of Austria at this moment. Pitt's system was equally as false, and has been swept from the face of Europe, leaving only one monument of its folly-the National Debt of England. As to weathering the storm, he perished in the very fury of it. He saw all his costly plans thrown to the