to gloss over iniquity for the sake of supposed political rectitude, yet we are so biased in favor of humanity, virtue, and religion, that we will not pretend to treat, with philosophic coolness, deeds whose chief characteristics were inhumanity, immorality, and impiety.

Every one, of course, has some general notion of injustice and violence attendant on Bonaparte's movements in the Peninsula; but very few have a definite knowledge of specific facts. The volumes before us contain such a host of these, as painfully and clearly show how devoid of magnanimity, how reckless,and unsparing of friends and foes, how perfidious, and without shame, was the great emperor. How he, who could make a pathetic speech over a dog on a field of battle, and shrink like a woman at the cracking of the bones beneath his carriage wheels, could for years deliberately send fire, sword, and famine, and woes of every sort and degree among an innocent people, merely because they would not submit to a lawless usurpation; how he, who was so kind in his disposition, as to make all his family kings and queens, was not able to comprehend that other men might own such a generous devotion to their kindred and firesides and altars, as to struggle amidst doubt, difficulty, defeat, and despair, until their country's soil was either their free possession or their grave. Equally depraved, and fit instruments to work out such ends, were almost all the French, from the "men of renown" who led the armies, down to the meanest soldier. They feared neither God nor man. We do not mean merely that they were bad men, who had no sense of religion; that would be to give too tame a character to these children of the revolution. By not fearing man, we mean, that, with very few exceptions, they set at nought all in which man sees any virtue or any praise. By not fearing GOD, we mean, that they worked their wickedness more boldly than even the lost spirits; for these tremble while they do ill, and confess the power that is to punish them; whereas the French, in the peninsula, committed, as a body, the most abominable crimes, with the coolest recklessness. It was, of course, to be expected that the common soldiery would shed blood and do violence; nor would we look for a very nice sense of honor or honesty in the camp herd. But these men were only a little worse than their officers; and vice in all its forms, found as apt disciples in marshals and generals, as in corporals and privates. Of faithlessness,

selfishness, cruelty, licentiousness, extortion, theft, and everything bad but cowardice, they were all guilty-not that all sinned in all these respects; but from some one or more, none were free. We bespeak special attention for the case of Junot and his companions, who actually stole, and hid their booty, and tried to get off with it unseen by the English. All of them submitted to be the tools of Bonaparte's ambition, because it subserved their own, or because, with their eyes open, they had not the courage to free themselves.

It would be vain to attempt a narrative of the conduct of the French throughout the whole of a war which lasted more than five years. If we were to select facts here and there, however numerous they might be, they would still present but a faint idea of the vast and connected system of immorality and oppression upon which they proceeded. We have therefore concluded that our object would be best attained by confining our attention to a particular period of the war, which may be taken as a specimen of the whole. In doing this we shall be careful to select such a portion as will exhibit, as nearly as possible, the average degree of that wickedness which marked, more or less, all the French operations in the Peninsula.

By the peace concluded with the emperor of Russia, at Tilsit, July, 1807, Bonaparte had been left at liberty to turn his attention to so tempting a prize as the Peninsula. As both its governments were perforce his humble allies, and no pretext for open violence presented itself, he was obliged. to have recourse to diplomacy. The prime minister of Spain at this time was the notorious Godoy, the favorite of the monarch Charles IV., and the paramour of his worthless queen. The infamy of this man was so deep, and his administration so unprincipled and oppressive, that he was absolutely loathed by the whole nation. Conscious of their hatred, he was anxious to secure, in the emperor of the French, a powerful friend in time of need. Ferdinand, prince of Asturias, and heir apparent, who was little loved by his father, and positively hated by his mother, had gathered around him a party who desired the overthrow of Godoy, which, like most oppositions, was mainly kept together by having a common object of dislike, and whose component parts differed as the several periods of the day-old Castilian honor, bright as noon; the bravo's malignity and revenge, black as midnight; and a hundred other characters,

of as many twilight hues, of whom time alone could show whether they would brighten into virtue, or darken into crime. In despotic Spain, this party had no other means of gaining their end than intrigue, and by the advice of some of them, the prince wrote a secret letter to Bonaparte. The Spanish Bourbon betook himself to the usurper of his kinsman's seat, begged protection from a tyrant, and sued for a matrimonial alliance, and the honor of mingling his royal blood with that of the Corsican usurper! The emperor, who was playing a double game, left the letter for a time unanswered. He was even then carrying on a negotiation with the very enemy against whom the prince besought his aid; and as Godoy was master of the treasury and the army, and the prince was powerless, the latter was laid aside until a fitter time to use him. Meanwhile, through the agency of Godoy, the secret treaty of Fontainbleau was concluded, by which Bonaparte and Charles IV. contracted to seize and dismember the kingdom of Portugal. The northern part was to be given, unsought, to the king of Etruria, in lieu of his own dominions, which the emperor took away without even the formality of asking leave. The middle provinces were to be erected into a new sovereignty tributary to the king of Spain, if," etc.- leaving Charles's future acquisitions very much in dubio, The southern portion was destined for Manuel de Godoy, prince of peace and noble of the very realm he was plotting against. In carrying this treaty into effect, troops would be needed, and here came in play a master-stroke of Bonaparte's policy. Some time previous, in compliance with a former treaty of alliance between France and Spain, he had called upon the latter to furnish sixteen thousand of her best troops for service in the north of Europe, and another large body to march into Italy. These troops, of course, he kept busily employed, and as Spain, without them, could not complete the proposed dismemberment, a French army would have to be admitted into the Peninsula. Twenty thousand infantry, therefore, and six thousand cavalry, were to march upon Lisbon, and while various smaller bodies of Charles's army co-operated with them in Portugal, Spain itself would be left almost defenceless. At the same time forty thousand Frenchmen were to assemble at Bayonne, a few leagues, by land, from Spain, only to be ready in case the English, fifty times that distance by sea, should assist the Portuguese! This was as skilfully negotiated by Bonaparte

as it was stupidly done by Charles; it was a most wicked. business for both. Was there ever a transaction more full of infamy? Charles IV., bound by every tie of duty and of interest to support Portugal, not only abandoned her, but came in for a share of the spoil. Bonaparte, by deceit, injustice, and violence, attained his ambitious purpose, all the while being doubly deceitful, for while he dismembered Portugal by the aid of Spain, he was contriving the destruction of his ally. Yet worse than either was Godoy; an ingrate, for the queen of Portugal had bestowed upon him a title and a pension; a traitor, directly to Portugal, of which kingdom he was a noble, and indirectly to Spain, which he placed at the mercy of the French armies; a fool, to suppose that Bonaparte would ever give him the promised principality, and a knave—it would take pages to tell why. It is comforting to know, after reading of such a transaction, that by it, Charles lost his throne, Godoy his power and possessions, and Bonaparte his ALL. "That wretched war," said he to Las Casas, "was my ruin: it divided my forces, obliged me to multiply my efforts, and injured my character for morality."

The train being thus well laid, an open rupture with Portugal, (all this while in nominal alliance and friendship with France,) was all that was needed to fire it. An occasion for this Bonaparte found in the continental system. England, he had declared to be the enemy of the continent, and had therefore closed all the ports of the latter to her ships. Portugal alone kept up an intercourse upon which a large proportion of her subjects depended for their subsistence. More than a month, however, before the signing of the treaty of Fontainbleau, the prince of Brazil had been informed by the French and Spanish ambassadors, that he must come into the system of exclusion, close his ports to the English, imprison their resident merchants, and confiscate their property, or war would be declared against him by their respective sovereigns. The prince, who possessed many high qualities, refused to go to this length of injustice, but conscious of his weakness, and that yield he must to some extent, consented to close his ports, at the same time advising the English merchants to wind up their affairs, and quit the country. Three weeks had been allowed by Bonaparte for compliance with his demands, but before an answer could be returned to him, he seized the Portuguese vessels in his harbors, and before the three weeks had expired, he despatched Junot to

head the invading army. At the same time, both from the Spanish and the French courts, the Portuguese ambassadors were dismissed. Thinking to save his country from the horrors of invasion, the prince now yielded in toto, and arrested the few English merchants who had remained, declaring at the same time that so soon as an invading army entered Portugal, he would embark for Brazil. It was an important part of Bonaparte's plan, to get the royal family into his power, for through them he hoped to obtain their American possessions also; and while his agents, therefore, by fair and deceiving promises, endeavored to lull the prince into security, he threw aside all regard for decency, his previous and existing engagements, justice, the opinion of the world, everything but his own power, and ordered Junot to march rapidly upon Lisbon. With this, opened the first act of the tragedy. It was planned by a consummate master of the art, too cold and callous to heed the old rule, that deeds of blood should be done off the stage, and who boldly acted out his plot in the yery gaze of the horror-stricken world.

Junot," one of the most grasping, extravagant, and profligate of the French generals," a man whom Bonaparte himself, according to Las Casas, "stigmatized as a monster of rapacity," commenced his march from Salamanca, and on the seventeenth day of November, 1807, reached Alcantara, a frontier town of Portugal. On the same day, he informed the Portuguese of his coming, in a proclamation, in which their forced rupture with England was made the excuse for his invasion; his presence being needed to protect them from the "perfidious English," and to save Lisbon from the fate of Copenhagen. With vague promises, he mingled very definite threats, which might have served as a hint of that awful reality which in three days more the Portuguese began to experience. On the twenty-first, with one division of his army, he reached Castello Branco, about fifty miles from Alcantara. His coming had been announced but a few hours, and the astonished magistrates had made no preparations for entertaining him. In an ill-humor, he quartered himself in the Episcopal Palace. His adjutants plundered the bishop's valuables, hunted out concealed money, and then openly demanded it. The night the French passed in the town is described, says Southey, as an image of hell. They were not resisted, and their general's word had been pledged for their good conduct; yet the latter set an exam