fanciful perspective; and nothing was more common in the salons and coteries than to hear praises and laudations of the French conquerors, coupled with sneers and reproaches against the Russian allies.

On the other hand Bonaparte dispatched Savary to endeavour to cajole the young czar, and, failing in that, to spy out what he could in the condition and disposition of the Russian army, which evidently caused him more serious thoughts than any enemy with whom he had hitherto contended. He gave Savary an autograph letter, signed Napoleon, in which he expressed how ambitious he was of obtaining the friendship of the Emperor Alexander, &c. According to Savary's own account he made very good use of his eyes in traversing the Russian bivouacs, and was very graciously received by the czar, who told him that he was naturally inclined to follow the same political system as his father the Emperor Paul; that he had only abandoned that system because France had shaken the equilibrium of Europe; but that now he could on no account abandon his unfortunate ally the Emperor Francis. Savary protested that the Emperor Napoleon, his master, was very desirous of peace, was not an implacable enemy to Austria, and that this was demonstrated by the terms he had already offered to the Emperor Francis. Alexander said mildly that these terms were too hard, that such conditions were not to be accepted, that he was sorry the want of moderation in Savary's master would oblige him to order the Russian troops to do their duty. He gave Savary a letter addressed to Bonaparte not as emperor and king, but as "Chief of the French Government." This imperial epistle signified nothing; but there was a deal of meaning and of use in the information brought back by the executioner of the Duke d'Enghien from the Russian camp, which he never ought to have been allowed to traverse at all. But Savary was even allowed

to return thither and to make still better use of his eyes and ears. Nature had made the man for a spy, and habit and long practice had perfected him in the art. This time he was the bearer of a verbal message requesting that the Emperor Alexander would consent to a personal interview with the Emperor Napoleon, when all differences might be arranged with so much ease. But Alexander was found to be firmer than ever in his resolution not to separate himself from his unfortunate ally. He refused the interview, but he sent one of his aides-de-camp, the Prince Dolgorouki, to Bonaparte's head-quarters with an offer to treat upon the following conditions: the independence of Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy; the evacuation of Naples, and indemnity to the Prince of Orange, and the full and entire execution of the treaty of Lunéville-conditions which Bonaparte rejected with scorn and anger.

As Bonaparte was getting farther and farther from his own frontiers and resources, as warlike populations were beginning to rise en masse all

VOL. IV.-GEO. III.

round him, as a few weeks would have brought thousands of jagers from Bohemia and Croatia, and thousands of horse from Hungary, it behoved the allied emperors to avoid a general action; and this they probably would have done but for the very significant fact that the Russians, whose commissariat has ever been the most thievish in the world, were already in a half-famished state. That which would have produced a plenty in the Russian camp had been left in Vienna for the French; Moravia was but a poor and hungry country ;they must therefore move forward, were it only for rations and quarters. And, quitting their strong positions at Olmutz and their entrenchments, behind which the French would not have ventured to attack them, the Russians and their spiritless allies advanced upon Brunn. Bonaparte retreated to the plain of Austerlitz, which he had very attentively surveyed several days before, and which he had found to be the best battle-field in those parts. The encounters which had taken place had given the French soldiers a very exalted notion of the Russian infantry. It was no longer possible to tell them that the Russians were a set of undisciplined barbarians; it was better to pique the susceptible French pride: and therefore Bonaparte told his army that "they were now going to meet a new enemy who had been brought from the ends of the world by the gold of England;" that "this contest was of much importance to the honour of the French infantry; that the question must now finally be settled whether the French infantry were the first, or the second, in Europe."

Marshal Kutusoff, who was the real commanderin-chief of the allied army, began his movements for attack on the morning of the 1st of December. The movements were beautifully executed, with order and precision; but the exercised eye of Bonaparte saw that, in order to execute his plan of turning the right wing of the French, Kutusoff would extend his lines too much; that there were a great many recruits, particularly among the Austrians; and he is said to have exclaimed, "By to-morrow evening that army is mine!" The day was passed in active preparation, in disposing in the most advantageous manner the tremendous trains of artillery which the French had dragged with them; and the night, for Bonaparte, was one of intense anxiety. He went from bivouac to bivouac-the night being bitterly cold and stormy-conversing familiarly with his soldiers, and uttering short and easily retained sentences to keep up their courage and serve as rallying words. Then; worn out with fatigue, he snatched a half-hour's sleep by the side of one of the bivouac fires. On the morrow morningit was the first anniversary of his imperial coronation in Notre Dame-he was on horseback long before daylight. Thick fogs and mist hung over the plain and the neighbouring heights on which the allies were encamped: the sun could scarcely break through the vapoury and cold obscurity; but at last it appeared, red and lurid, like a globe dipped in blood. Then Bonaparte galloped along

2 A

the line shouting, "Soldiers, we must finish this campaign with a thunderbolt!" and the soldiers waved their caps in the air and shouted, Vive l'empereur! vive le jour de sa fête ! It was time to be moving and doing, for the artillery of the allies was heard thundering on the French right. To give any details of the general action which immediately ensued would occupy more space than we can spare. The fatal result fully corresponded with Bonaparte's calculation. Kutusoff's line, too far extended, was broken through by a concentrated attack made by Marshals Soult, Lannes, and Murat, with all the French cavalry; the Russian divisions were separated; the Austrian recruits fought without energy or intelligence; and, after a terrible conflict on the part of the imperial Russian guards, the allied army was routed in detail, and pushed off the field. Its loss was tremendous; thousands were drowned in the frozen lakes in the rear of their position, the ice, though thick, not being strong enough to bear so great a weight. Entire lines of Russian infantry were mowed down by the numerous French artillery; but other lines sprung up to supply their places, and the best part of Kutusoff's army retired in admirable order, being covered by clouds of Cossacks, who, with their irregular charges and their long lances, repeatedly drove back Murat's regular cavalry. By one or two o'clock in the afternoon the victory of the French was decided; but it was near midnight ere the Russians entirely left the field; and then they marched off with such a countenance that the French did not dare to follow them. In the course of the morning, once at least, Soult was in the greatest danger; Kutusoff nearly succeeded in re-uniting his divisions; and the fate of Bonaparte seemed to hang by a thread: but a charge made by all the cavalry of his guard, and then a terribly sustained fire of grape-shot on the Russian squares, turned the scale, and allowed him to hum his opera air-" Ah comme il y viendra!" The two armies which engaged were nearly equal in number; but the French had a decided superiority in artillery, both as to number and quality; and it was on the employment of that arm that they principally relied for their victory. The Russian infantry made a great use of the bayonet most of the French that were wounded were wounded by that weapon, and in nearly every case those wounds proved mortal. In the lying bulletin and Moniteur, the French loss in killed and wounded was reduced to about 2500 men; but in reality it appears to have exceeded 5000. Such was the battle of Austerlitz, or, as the French soldiers called it, the battle of the Three Emperors. At ten o'clock in the evening the conqueror issued one of his proclamations or addresses to his troops, in which, as usual, truth gave way to rhetoric, and figures were exaggerated ad libitum. "Soldiers of the grand army!" said the proclamation, "before this day be plunged into the sea of eternity, your emperor ought to speak with you, and express his satisfaction to all those who have the good fortune to fight in this me

morable battle. Soldiers! you are the first warriors of the world! The memory of this day, and of your exploits, will be eternal. Yes, so long as history and the world shall exist, it will be repeated, after millions of centuries, that, in the plains of Austerlitz, an army bought by the gold of England, a Russian army of 76,000 men, has been destroyed by you. The miserable remains of that army, in which the mercantile spirit of a despicable nation had placed its last hope, are in flight, and are going to announce to the savage inhabitants of the north what Frenchmen can do; to announce to them that you who, after destroying the Austrian army near Ulm, have said at Vienna, That army is no more! will tell them also at Petersburgh, The Emperor Alexander has no longer an army! Soldiers of the grand army! it is not yet four months since your emperor said to you at Boulogne, 'We are going to march to annihilate a coalition plotted by the gold and intrigues of England;' and now the result is the destruction of 300,000 men in the campaign of Ulm, and of the forces of two great monarchs, &c. &c." As the French could never have enough of this sort of declamation, another address was issued on the morrow morning. 66 Soldiers," it said, “ I am satisfied with you; you have decorated your eagles with an immortal glory! An army of 100,000 men, commanded by the Emperors of Russia and Austria, has been, in less than four days, cut to pieces or dispersed; what escaped from your steel has been drowned in the lakes. Forty flags, the standards of the imperial guard of Russia, 120 pieces of cannon, 20 generals, more than 30,000 prisoners, are the result of the day for ever memorable. That boasted Russian infantry, though superior in number, could not stand your shock; and henceforward you have no rivals to be jealous of. Thus, in two months, this third coalition has been conquered and dissolved." On the same day, and from the battle field still strewed with the dead, Bonaparte dictated and signed a circular letter to the bishops and priests of France, commanding them to sing Te Deum for the glorious successes he had obtained, and which he declared to be a visible proof of the favour and protection of Almighty God. The exaggeration employed was altogether monstrous; but the French soldiers were not the men that would critically examine facts and figures; and it was rolling, roaring bulletins in this style that Fouché wanted to enchant the Parisians, and keep the French at home quiet. quiet. According to General Kutusoff's official account, his loss in killed and prisoners did not exceed 12,000 men; and nothing is more certain than that the Russians had retired in perfect order, in solid bronze-like masses, and that the French had shown no inclination to follow them. The coalition was not destroyed by this battle-the case of the allies could have been hopeless only to cowards. General Benningsen was on his way from the Russian frontier with another corps d'armée; the Archdukes Charles and John were

so near that eight or ten days of forced marches, and by a route where none could stop them, would have brought them with their united forces on the eastern edge of Moravia, and on Bonaparte's flank on one side of Moravia, Bohemia had not been touched, and was full of loyalty and spirit; and on the other side of it the brave Hungarians, who had succoured the Empress Maria Theresa when, in the extremity of her distress-driven from her capital by the generals of Louis XV., and by Frederick the Great of Prussia-she presented herself to them in her widow's weeds, and with her infant son in her arms, and implored their help, having no help or hope but in God and them, were as ready now as then to swear to die for their sovereign, and as sure to keep their oath. That nation was rude, but heroic; serious, melancholy, determined, and eminently patriotic or national. The Hungarians could not, like the burghers of Vienna, and the unimpassioned boors of the duchy of Austria, see without excitement and without agony the march of foreign armies over their native plains and hills. Though coarser in their exterior, they were a people of finer imagination; they were a people of traditions and oral legends, and their legends were filled with the staple commodity of the poetry of all free and spirited nations, the victories obtained by native swords and native ranks over the proud invaders of their country and without this finer imagination, without this species of national poetical temperament, without traditions and legends wound round the hearts as well as memories of the popular masses, no country is fitted for heroical warfare. By a side-movement the Russians, and what remained of the Austrians who had fought at Austerlitz, might have got to the Hungarian frontier, might there have awaited the junction of Benningsen, and the two archdukes, and the Hungarian levies that were being brought up by good officers; and that war might have been prolonged, until Bonaparte was ruined, in the great basin which lies between the left bank of the Danube and the Carpathian mountains. But there were traitors as well as cowards round the Emperor Francis; and by various means he was made to shudder at the horrors which must attend a protracted warfare in his own countries, and to hope that his conqueror would be magnanimous in the hour of victory, or be induced by the aspect of his own critical situation to grant such terms as he might accept. The Emperor of Russia refused to join in the humiliating measure; but Francis, the very day after the battle, dispatched Prince John of Lichtenstein, who had all along appertained to the French or peace party, to demand an interview of Bonaparte. "You want a suspension of arms,' said the victor; "but before I grant you an armistice you must break with the Russians. The Russians must retire. We will then treat separately. I will afterwards make a separate peace with the Emperor Alexander, or if not I will beat him again! As for the house of Austria, I must have

guarantees that she will not again take up arms against me. It was not I that began this war. But, first of all, no more Russians! no more of your levies en masse in Hungary and Bohemia!" Lichtenstein appears either to have sold himself or to have allowed his own fears and the fortunate soldier's hurried and passionate rhetoric to overwhelm him in the course of a few hours, and seemingly without a struggle, he agreed to give up far more than Bonaparte could have gained in two or in even three of the most successful campaigns. Lichtenstein returned to his master loaded with the compliments and eulogiums of his master's enemy; and on the following day the Emperor Francis had himself a personal interview in the French camp with Bonaparte, whom he embraced

and called "Sir, my brother." It is added that Francis in a very illogical speech meanly threw the whole blame of the war upon the English, saying they were a set of selfish traffickers, who would set the Continent on fire in order to secure to themselves the commerce of the world; but this rests solely upon French authorities, which are scarcely any authority at all. On the 6th of December an armistice was signed by Marshal Berthier and the Prince of Lichtenstein, the Austrians engaging to give up Presburg on the frontiers of Hungary, Carinthia, Styria, Carniola, Venice; not to allow the Russians to remain on any part of their territories; to stop the levy en masse in Hungary and Bohemia, and not to admit into their territories any foreign army whatsoever. The last clause seemed to have reference to the Prussians, although the battle of Austerlitz, and still more this wretched armistice, must have removed from Bonaparte's mind any serious apprehension on that subject. In fact, as soon as might be after the battle, Count Haugwitz, the Prussian envoy, had waited upon him to offer his congratulation on the glorious victory which he had obtained. Bonaparte said with a sneer, that the Prussian compliments had been intended for others, but that fortune had transferred them to him. He had however shown that he felt the insecurity of his own situation-there, isolated in the centre of Moravia,

and in the midst of an inclement winter-and the ruin which any hostile movement on the part of Prussia might yet bring down upon him; and, to keep that power quiet, he had promised Haugwitz to cede and assign to it for ever the electorate of Hanover, the lure which had been so often held out before, the prize for which the cabinet of Berlin had been so long sighing and longing. The Emperor Alexander retired by regular day marches into his own territories: Bonaparte returned to Vienna and the palace of Schönbrunn to complete with Talleyrand the draft of a definitive treaty of peace with Austria. This treaty was signed by the Emperor of Austria at Presburg, whence it takes its name, on the 26th of December. Not less but more than Lichtenstein had agreed to give was extorted from Austria. By this treaty of Presburg she ceded, nominally to Napoleon's kingdom of Italy, not only Venice and the Venetian provinces in Upper Italy, but the Venetian provinces in Istria, in Dalmatia, and on the coast of Albania, which she had possessed ever since the treaty of Campo Formio; she ceded to the Elector of Bavaria the whole of the Tyrol, with the bishopric of Passau and other territories; she ceded to Wurtemberg and Baden, those other liege vassals of France, other districts; she recognised the regal titles of the Electors of Bavaria and Wurtemberg, and the grand ducal title of the Elector of Baden,-for the Emperor Napoleon had resolved that the first two should have the rank of kings, and that the Elector of Baden, who had taken the kidnapping and murder of the Duke d'Enghien in such good part, and who, like the other un-German princes, had rendered important services during this campaign, should have the rank of grand duke; and, in addition to these and other sacrifices, Austria in a secret article agreed to pay to the French a military contribution of 140,000,000 of francs. The population thus turned over to the conqueror by a few strokes of the pen was estimated at about 3,000,000. But there was worse than a loss of population, and a limited surrender of territory: by being made to give up Trieste, which had long been her only sea-port, and all that she had obtained by the treaties of Campo Formio and Lunéville on the Adriatic, Austria entirely shut herself out from the sea, and became an inland power, without the faculty of exporting or importing directly a bale of goods or a cart-load of produce -she became enclavée, cooped in on every side; and on the Adriatic side, where she most wanted freedom and extension, a hostile state, a strip of the kingdom of Italy, which was merely a province of France, was interposed between her and the sea. The fracture made of the independence of Switzerland and of the Grisons had weakened her frontier on the side of France; and now the disseverance of the Tyrol, the cradle of the imperial house, and the oldest of its possessions, completed this ruin of frontier and bulwarks, and gave the French the entire command of the best routes which connect Upper Italy with Germany. But

66

still more loss of influence and honour!-all the smaller German states of the Rhine were formed by Bonaparte, who put himself at the head of it as Protector," into what was called the Confederation of the Rhine: the old Germanic empire was thus dissolved: the influence of the French was fully established over a great part of Germany; and very soon after this treaty the Emperor Francis formally renounced his title of Elective Emperor of Germany, and assumed that of Hereditary Emperor of Austria, &c. The King of Prussia, who had been the only king in Germany until Bonaparte chose to give kingly crowns to his vassals of Bavaria and Wurtemberg, was recommended by the cabinet who were leading him to his ruin to take the title of Emperor of Prussia, but he did not. Less than three weeks after the signing of the treaty of Presburg, Eugene Beauharnais married Augusta Amelia, daughter of the king of Bavaria : and shortly after Mademoiselle or Princess Stephanie Beauharnais, Eugene's cousin, was given in marriage to the son and heir of the Grand Duke of Baden, who had earnestly solicited the honour of an alliance with the august family of Bonaparte. Another matrimonial alliance was contemplated with the family of the King of Wurtemberg. There was scarcely one of all those petty, longpedigreed potentates, but would have consented to mix his blood with that of the Corsican soldier of fortune, or of those connected with him: their fears destroyed their pride: and, in order to have and to hold what the conqueror might choose to leave them or give them, they would have thrown their once prized genealogical books into the fire, and have declared the Napoleonic dynasty the most ancient in Europe.

Other parties connected with the coalition were to blame besides Mack and the Aulic Council; and the government of Pitt, who had made the Convention, had made a very injudicious use of the resources of their country. That system of petty expeditions which had so long disgraced England, or which, at the least, had deprived her of the honour she might otherwise have gained, had again been resorted to; and for the present saving of a few millions the necessity had been incurred of a future expenditure of very many millions. If the King of Sweden, whose zeal in the cause was depressed only by his poverty, had been liberally supplied with money, if 25,000 or 30,000 British troops had been sent to the Baltic in the autumn, a great movement might have been effected in the north of Germany, the vacillations of Prussia might have been brought to an end by those best of all arguments, the presence of a great allied army and the exceeding great probability of the French being the losing party, and Prussia would have carried with her into the coalition Saxony, Brunswick, and one or two other minor states; Bonaparte would have been obliged to divide and subdivide his grand army; he might have been attacked on his left flank and on his rear, and the Hanoverians, and probably the Dutch, whose