intending to offer a single remark in opposition to this, their undoubted right: but, if the Russians, under the idea of defeating the French, thought fit to reduce to ashes their ancient capital, were not the French, whose existence was entwined with that of the capital, fully justified in preserving the city, and at every possible sacrifice. The men who were caught and shot by the French were found torch in hand; and they were accordingly prevented from accomplishing the destruction of the French, by their own. Surely there could in this be no very outrageous act committed, against the rights of belligerents; nor any thing so wonderful in the transaction, that should have made it threefold atrocious on the part of Napoleon not to recollect the precise number of the incendiaries who fell: yet the Editor can see but murder in the first predicament, and fiendish cruelty in the second. There are various ways of prosecuting war: nations of old did not scruple to poison the waters of their territories; envenomed arrows and other deadly weapons followed; air-guns we hear of in more modern days; and at the present time it is the fashion to render wars national, or, in other words, to make a desert of the territory through which the invading army has to pass. The destruction of towns enters as a consequence into this plan.

*The Russians, in 1709, followed the same mode of abandoning their houses, and voluntarily setting fire to their towns

We shall not presume to decide which have been the most moral and fit modes, adopted at different periods by a certain few of the inhabitants of the earth, for the annihilation of their brothers, but the situation of the French in Russia was extraordinary, and would have justified extraordinary measures. If the Russians followed every scheme for ruining the French, it was fair, according to the rules of war, for the French to exert their utmost to thwart the Russians: and, convinced as the French general was, that the success of his expedition wholly depended on the preservation of Moscow, it can surely never be supposed that he would sit tamely in the Kremlin, and see himself burnt out of his conquest, by a troop of robbers and cut-throats-by men whose very emancipation testified the desperate tenor of their lives.

The chroniclers of Java would have us believe that the criminals who succeeded in plucking the poison from the upas tree, were allowed, for a recompense, to drag out unmolested the term of their miserable existence; but that few ever returned from the attempt. The part allotted to the slaves of Moscow was of a similar nature: ought we, therefore, to marvel that many

and villages. This is mentioned by Count Piper, minister to Charles XII. of Sweden.-Memoirs of John, Duke of Marlborough, Coxe, vol. 3, p. 121.

found in it their doom? Like the collectors of poison, their fate was foreseen: had it been otherwise, more honest hands would have accomplished the work.

CHAP. X.

WATERLOO.

"The Edinburgh reviewer thinks that the Duke of Wellington could suffer himself to be surprised:-thinks, did we say? such a drunken dream of an opinion is not to be called thought: it is the very negation of all common sense."-New Times, September, 1822.

We have selected this short passage from a very long, not to say very fulsome panegyric, on his Grace of Wellington. With the praises lavished for the hundredth time on the battle of Waterloo, and its grand results in favour of European liberty, we do not mean to contend, dubious as this much-vaunted liberty may appear in the eyes of many a curtailed continental state: neither do we intend to pry into that sanctum sanctorum of the Editor of the New Times, the private correspondence with France, on which he so greatly plumes himself, and which, with reference to the weighty affairs of 1815, he deems so important. As far as regards aught that an editor's private correspondence may disclose, we know unfortunately too well from woeful experience how

newspaper articles are manufactured, to pay one iota more attention to those dignified with the imposing title of private, than to others less ostentatiously set forth :-he only can be astonished at stage tricks who has never moved behind the scenes. We proceed, therefore, to the consideration of the statute of lunacy issued against those drivellers, who, with the Edinburgh reviewer, think that the British commander was in some measure surprised: and we trust that the Editor will give us full credit for our candour, however low he may rate our judgment, when, in common with divers others of the vulgar multitude, we too are inclined to echo the word 'surprised.' We will state in a few words wherein consists our surprise, and shall endeavour, like most madmen, to argue correctly, even though our premises be wrong. We are surprised then, that a large and hostile army should have been collected from various quarters of an extensive kingdom-that it should have marched against a fortified town-seized upon it— still marched on-and, beating back during twentyfour hours every force opposed, should finally have assumed a position literally within cannon-shot of its opponent's head quarters, without that opponent even suspecting the approximation of his foe." These are the facts to create our surprise; and

* Buonaparte, having collected his army between the Sambre