Brabant, had spent his large income for the defence of the country's liberties, and had been one of the first to oppose the Emperor Joseph. But he was now denounced as a traitor, arrested by Vaneupen, thrown into prison, and for five weeks subjected to examinations and inquisitions in order to find grounds for charging him capitally. This was in the province of Flanders, into which he had fled from Brabant, his own province, for protection. The judges declared that he was innocent; but the states of Flanders attempted to prolong his confinement and to suppress the decision of the judges. As some companies of volunteers, to whom they applied for assistance, refused to co-operate, the states endeavoured to have the duke carried off by night, and consigned to the more powerful hands of his enemies in Brabant. A party of lawless ruffians they employed actually tore him from his family and forced him into a carriage; but the volunteers, who had before refused to co-operate, rushed to his rescue and delivered him.

These measures increased the odium and unpopularity of those who had been concerned in them; and the two supreme leaders of the democratic party-Vaneupen, whom Dumouriez had described as a hypocrite, and Vandernoot, whom he had styled a Masaniello-got still harder names from the Belgian people. The common people of Flanders who had been proud of General Vandermersch, a native of their own province, were well nigh fleeing to arms to rescue him from his captivity, and take vengeance on Brabant for arresting him. Favoured by these distractions and fierce dissensions, the troops of the emperor, who had been almost entirely driven out of the provinces, recovered heart and confidence, and, retracing their steps, they occupied again several important positions, and defeated the disorganized, ill-commanded Belgians wherever they met them and whatever was their superiority in number. Vaneupen and Vandernoot made a terrible noise, but could do little else. They wanted money and men, but their credit had sunk so low that they and the congress could not raise a small loan either at home or abroad; and on account of the arrest of Vandermersch all the towns of Flanders peremptorily refused to send a single man to the army. It was better, they said, to have the emperor back again than to live under two such emperors as Vaneupen and Vandernoot. At the same time the people in all the provinces were incensed by the discovery of enormous frauds and peculations which had been practised by many of the patriot drivers of this revolution, and of a palpable tendency in many of them to make advantageous terms for themselves with the court of Vienna. In this state of popular feeling the Emperor Leopold issued another me- i

morial, in which he solemnly pledged himself to observe every article of the "Joyous Entry," and to restore to the states the constitutions they had enjoyed previously to the innovations of the Emperor Joseph. And very soon after, having wisely put an end to the causes of discontent in Hungary, Leopold was enabled to tranquillize that brave and important part of his subjects, and to obtain from them both money and men. By the month of August, the imperialists, who had concentrated their forces on and near to the frontiers, under General Bender, were strengthened by the arrival of several regiments, and of all the material necessary for prosecuting the war with vigour. The Belgian congress had applied in vain for assistance to Prussia, to Holland, to England, to France. Prussia even intimated that she would rather take part with Austria than permit the present anarchy to continue in the Netherlands; and what the house of Orange most feared was, that the Belgians, if assisted by France, might press upon the frontiers of Holland, and call upon the democratic party there, who had so recently been put down by force of arms, to rise again. In fact, the only country from which the Belgian democrats ought to have expected assistance was France, where a democracy fiercer than their own seemed all-triumphant.

The same revolutionary principle united these two nations; and, as Vandernoot proclaimed the sovereignty of the people in Belgium, and upheld France as his model, it seemed but fair and natural that the French people should assist him. By some strange and unaccountable means the subject was kept out of the national assembly at Paris, or at least no decrees were passed or direct motions made about the Belgians until it was too late to render them any service. But the Jacobin Club at Paris made up for the silence of the assembly; they discussed the business night after night, and returned the admiration with which Vandernoot had honoured them. The French Jacobins declared that, if the rights of man, and liberty and equality, were allowed to be trampled upon in Belgium, the attempt would soon be made to bring the iron-shod hoofs of despotism upon them in France; that if Be! gium was overrun by the emperor, France would lie open to his attack. But the king's ministers were allowed to persist in their inactivity and seeming indifference, which appears the more strange, as they were accused of considering the Belgian provinces as the bridge over which the royalists' counter-revolution was to penetrate into France, and of being quite enchanted at beholding the fate which awaited insurrection in that near country. In the month of October the Emperor Leopold, as had been agreed at the con

1 Dumouriez's Mémoires,

of congress, holding a crucifix in his hand, and, placing the sacred emblem in the chair of state, and falling on his knees before it, he protested in the most solemn manner that he would never pay allegiance to the emperor or the house of Austria. A proposal was made on the 20th of November, the very eve of the day appointed for their submission, that the emperor's third son, the Archduke Charles, should be acknowledged sovereign of the Netherlands-the succession to remain in his family, but not to revert to any branch of the house of Austria possessing the sovereignty of any other country. If made at an earlier period-if proposed before the alarm spread through all the courts of Europe by the headlong course of the French revolution, and before the deliberations, conclusions, and treaties entered into at Reichenbach-there might have been a bare possibility of success to this scheme, and the Belgians might have obtained for their sovereign the ablest and most spirited prince that the house of Austria has produced for many ages; but now it was greatly too late for that or any other proposition, except absolute submission, to be entertained. General Bender was crossing the Meuse with his 30,000 men, and the army of independence was become an army of runaways. Advancing right upon Brussels, Bender despatched an aide-de-camp to the congress sitting there, to name a short number of days within which they were to determine whether they would accede to the conditions offered them, and trust to the honour and faith of the emperor and of the three mediating powers, assuring them at the same time that, if they obliged him, General Bender, to draw on his boots once more, he would not take them off again until he had chased them all out of the Netherlands. The congress was silent. The time expired. Old Bender drew on his boots and marched rapidly to beat up their quarters. But the congress-men did not await his arrival; with the members of the war department, and with all who had been most active in the revolution, they consulted their safety by flight, some fleeing into Holland, some into Ger many, but the greater part of them betaking themselves to the more congenial atmosphere of Paris. The city of Brussels surrendered to the Austrians on the 2d of December. The example was followed by the other cities of Flanders and Brabant; and before the end of the year all those provinces quietly returned under the dominion of the emperor, who religiously kept all his engagements with them.

gress of Reichenbach between him and the courts | thaw and dissolution. He entered the assembly of Berlin, the Hague, and London, engaged in the most solemn manner, and under the obligation of an oath to be taken under the guarantee of those three allied powers, to govern each of his Belgian provinces according to the constitutions, charters, and privileges which were in force during the reign of his beloved and popular mother the Empress Maria Theresa. In the same manifesto he invited, called upon, and summoned his Belgic subjects to acknowledge his lawful authority; declaring that he would bury in oblivion all the excesses and disorders committed during the late years by a general amnesty, to be published in favour of all who, before the 21st of November, should lay down their arms, and cease from all instigations and attempts against the peaceable exercise of his authority. He promised to visit all the states in order to ascertain the wishes of all classes, and concert, with persons properly chosen, the best means of promoting the general good; and he conjured and entreated them all, in the name of that oath which they had sworn to their country, and which was as dear to him as to them, not to reject the hand which he held out to them, and which was the hand of an affectionate father. The parties who had begun the insurrection, including noblesse, priests, monks, divinity professors, peasantry and common people, would have been disposed to rest satisfied with these conditions, even though they had not been disgusted with the Vandernoots. Many men who had hitherto remained in the field went home without furloughs. Still, however, the congress persisted, and maintained a tone of defiance, even when the army under Bender was raised to 30,000 men, consisting of the best troops in the Emperor's service. Vandernoot's diminished army was commanded by General Schoenfeldt, who is described by Dumouriez as a Prussian officer, an impostor also, and as being in the pay, at the time, of the King of Prussia. It had been foiled and defeated with terrible loss in the month of September by only a small part of the Austrian forces; and now that Bender was coming on, Schoenfeldt ran away to Prussia; and all that the disorganized, demoralized, distracted army of independence could do was to retreat skirmishing. In all these affairs a considerable number of French Jacobin volunteers got knocked on the head by the Austrians. The provisional governments in the different provinces began to disband as fast as the soldiers, fleeing for the most part to Paris. Vaneupen, who was a priest by profession, before he became a democratic revolutionist and co-dictator with Vandernoot, did what in him lay to keep up the spirit of his party, which seemed suffering every where a most rapid

A convention between the ministers of the emperor and those of the three allied powers, Great Britain, Prussia, and Holland, was signed at the Hague on the 10th of December, by which

the Belgic provinces were not only restored to | Sahib, or Tippoo Sultaun, who could never forget their old rights and privileges, but also obtained or forgive the humiliations he had met with at several new advantages calculated to render more the end of the last war, hated the English almost secure their ancient constitutions. These consti- to the pitch of madness; and he had superadded tutions were not models of absolute perfection- a religious fanaticism as mad as this hatred. He they would have been regarded with sovereign contempt by that rule-and-line constitution-maker the Abbé Sièyes-but they had kept the Netherlanders a tolerably happy people, and they certainly secured some of the most important of the rights and blessings of freedom. With regard to the great question at issue in France, the easy overthrow of the half-fledged democracy and Jacobinism of the Netherlands certainly exercised some evil influences, which contributed essentially to enormous miscalculations and blunders, and to disgraceful and fatal reverses; it induced the French emigrants, the princes, and the aristocracies of Europe to believe that the overthrow of the gigantic democracy of France would be a work of almost equal ease; and hence arose delays, insufficiency of preparation, and a blind and presumptuous confidence.

In this busy year attempts were begun to revolutionize Poland, and the first impulse was evidently received from France; but we may wait till the year 1792 to give an account of the ill-judged or ill-timed proceedings, which ended in the total destruction of the Polish republic. The truce which the Emperor Leopold had concluded with the Turks soon after his accession, and which had so soon been followed by a treaty of peace, had not induced the Empress Catherine to lay down her victorious arms. During the summer and autumn of 1790 a desultory savage war was carried on between Russians and Turks on the shores of the Black Sea, and by the banks of the Danube. In several petty encounters the Turks had the advantage; but, when they made a grand effort to penetrate into the Russian conquests between the Black Sea and the Caspian, they were defeated on the river Kuban with terrible loss. The Russians, however, began to feel the effects of their long efforts in a languor and exhaustion; and the czarina was warned by the congress at Reichenbach, that England, Prussia, Holland, and even her old ally Austria, were determined not to permit any further dismemberment of the Ottoman empire. Moreover, she knew that the Poles had opened secret negotiations with Sultan Selim, and were disposed to rise and take her Turkish armies in flank and rear as soon as ever a favourable opportunity should offer. The great termagant of the North had already lowered the insolent tone of her diplomacy; it was therefore pretty clear that this war would soon cease.

Another war, which more directly concerned England had broken out in the East. Tippoo

imagined himself the chosen servant of the prophet Mahomet, predestined, in the eternal book of fate, to root out the Nazarenes from India, and cast them into the bottomless pits of Gehenna. His cruelties to the poor nairs and Hindoo people of the Malabar coast, who had favoured the English, had been terrible. Nearly at the same time that Tippoo sent a numerous embassy to die of the plague at Constantinople, or on the road, he despatched a secret messenger to Paris to invite the French government to send six thousand of their best troops to the Carnatic, with which assistance he engaged to drive the English out of every part of Hindoostan. The Indian diplomatist, apparently a born Frenchman, arrived safely in France, and there met with a very favourable reception from all who wished the ruin of England-a wide category, which may be said to have included nearly every man, woman, and child in that kingdom or republic. Even some of the king's ministers were enchanted with the project, for Tippoo Sultaun offered to pay for transport, clothing, and maintenance of the troops, and to secure the French in the enjoyment of greater advantages than the English had ever possessed in India. Moreover, the terrible insurrection of the blacks in St. Domingo, who had been too suddenly in

doctrinated in the Rights of Man and the gospel | more to carry fire and sword to the walls of Madof liberty and equality, rendered necessary the sending a considerable force thither; and, under cover of this armament, it was calculated that an expedition might be sent to the Malabar or Coromandel coast, without exciting the suspicions of the English government. But these ministers and their encouraging representations could not overcome the scruples and the repugnance of Louis XVI. "This resembles," said he, "the affair of America, which I never think of without regret. My youth was taken advantage of at that time, and we are suffering for it now. The lesson is too severe to be forgotten!"

ras. Medows' countermarch soon drove the Mysorean back again beyond the mountains. In the meantime General Abercromby, with the Bombay army, landed at Tellicherry, and reduced nearly all the places which the enemy held on the Malabar coast, restoring the nairs and the other petty Hindoo rajahs, who all co-operated with the English in expelling their tyrants and oppressors. Our ally, the Rajah of Travancore, was com pletely re-established in his dominions, but no further progress was made against Tippoo Sultaun this year, and the war seemed likely to drag on.3