annals of jacobinism and republicanism. We have, at the same time, taken care not to forget ourselves in this new distribution of supremacy. France is to furnish the stock of the new dynasties for Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden. What would you think, were you to awake one morning the subject of King Arthur O'Connor the First? You would, I dare say, be even more surprised than I am, in being the subject of Napo leone Buonaparte the First. You know, I suppose, that O‘Connor is a general of division, and a commander of the Legion of Honour; the bosom friend of Talleyrand, and courting at this moment, a young lady, a relation of our Empress, whose portion may one day be an empire. But I am told that, notwithstanding Talleyrand's recommendations, or the approbation of her Majesty, the lady prefers a colonel, her own countryman to the Irish general. Should, however, our Emperor announce his determination, she would be obliged to marry as he commands, were he even to give her his groom, or his horse, for a spouse.

You can form no idea how wretched and despised all the Irish rebels are here; O'Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to Talleyrand, to General Valence, and to Madame Genlis ; but even he is looked on with a sneer, and, if he ever was re spected in England, must endure, with poignancy, the contempt to which he is frequently exposed in France. When I was in your country, I often heard it said, that the Irish were generally considered as a debased and perfidious people, extremely addict. ed to profligacy, and drunkenness, and when once drunk, more cruelly ferocious than even our jacobins. I thought it then, and I still believe it, a national prejudice, because I am convinced, that the vices or virtues of all civilized nations are relatively the same; but those Irish rebels we have seen here, and who must be like our jacobins, the very dregs of their country, have conducted themselves so as to inspire not only mistrust but abhorrence. It is also an undeniable truth, that they were greatly disappointed by our former and p.esent government. They expected to enjoy liberty and equality, and a pension for their treachery; but our police commissaries caught them at their landing, our gens-d'armes escorted them as criminals to their place of destination, and there they received just enough to prevent them from starving. If they complained, they were put in

irons, and if they attempted to escape, they were sent to the gal leys as malefactors, or shot as spies. Despair, therefore, no doubt, induced many to perpetrate acts, of which they were accused, and to rob, swindle, and murder, because they were pun. ished as thieves and assassins. But some of them, who have been treated in the most friendly, hospitable, and generous manner in this capital, have proved themselves ungrateful, as well as infamous. A lady of my acquaintance, of a once large fortune, had nothing left but some furniture, and her subsistence depended upon what she got by letting furnished lodgings. Mischance brought three young Irishmen to her house, who pretended to be in daily expectation of remittances from their country, and of a pension from Buonaparte. During six months, she not only lodged and supported them, but embarrassed herself to procure them linen and decent apparel. At last she was informed that each of them had been allowed sixty livres in the month, 27. 10. and that arrears had been paid them for nine months. Their debt to her was three thousand livres, 1257. but the day after slie asked for payment, they decamped, and one of them persuaded herdaugh ter, a girl of 14, to elope with him, and to assist him in robbing her mother of all her plate. He has indeed been since arrested, and sentenced to the galleys for eight years; but this punishment neither restored the daughter her virtue, nor the mother her proper ty. The other two denied their debts, and as she had no other evidence but her own scraps of accounts, they could not be forced to pay; their obdurate effrontery and infamy, however, excited such an indignation in the judges, that they delivered them over as swindlers to the Tribunal Correctional; and the minister of police ordered them to be transported as rogues and vagabonds to the colonies. The daughter died shortly after in consequence of a miscarriage, and the mother did not survive her more than a month, and ended her days in the Hotel Dieu, one of our com mon hospitals. Thus these depraved young men ruined and murdered their benefactress, and her child; and displayed before they were thirty, such consummate villainy, as few wretches, grown hoary in vice, have perpetrated. This act of scandalous notoriety injured the Irish reputation very much in this country; for here, as in many other places, inconsiderate people are apt to judge a whole nation according to the behaviour of some few of its outcasts.

THE plan of the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men; not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria, without disarming the Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia, and yet acknowledge the neutrality of Switzerland, are such political and military errors as require long successes to repair; but which such an enemy as Buonaparte always takes care not to leave unpunished.

The long inactivity of the army under the Archduke Charles has as much surprised us as the defeat of the army under General Mack; but from what I know of the former, I am persuaded that he would long since have pushed forward, had not his movements been unfortunately combined with those of the latter. The House of Lorraine never produced a more valiant warrior, nor Austria a more liberal or better instructed statesman, than this Prince. Heir of the talents of his ancestors, he has commanded with glory against France during the revolutionary war; and although he sometimes experienced defeats, he has rendered invaluable services to the chief of his House, by his courage, by his activity, by his constancy, and by that salutary firmness, which in calling the generals and superior officers to their duty, has often reanimated the confidence and the ardour of the soldier.

The Archduke Charles began, in 1793, his military career under Prince Cobourg, the commander in chief of the Austrian armies in Brabant, where he commanded the advanced guard, and distinguished himself by a valour sometimes bordering on temerity, but which by degrees acquired him that esteem and popularity among the troops, often very advantageous to him af terwards. He was, in 1794, appointed governor and captain-general of the Low Countries, and a field-marshal lieutenant of the army of the German empire. In April, 1796, he took the command in chief of the armies of Austria and of the empire, and in the following June engaged in several combats with General

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Moreau, in which he was repulsed, but in a manner that did equal honour to the victor and to the vanquished.

The Austrian army on the Lower Rhine, under General Wartensleben, having about this time, been nearly dispersed by Ge neral Jourdan, the Archduke left some divisions of his forces, under General Latour, to impede the progress of Moreau, and went with the remainder into Franconia, where he defeated Jourdan, near Amburgh and Wurtzburgh, routed his army entirely, and forced him to repass the Rhine in the greatest confusion, and with immense loss. The retreat of Moreau was the consequence of the victories of this Prince. After the capture of Kehi, in January, 1797, he assumed the command of the army of Italy, where he in vain employed all his efforts to put a stop to the victorious progress of Buonaparte, with whom at last he signed the preliminaries of peace at Leoben. In the spring of 1799, he again defeated Jourdan in Suabia, as he had done two years before in Franconia: but in Switzerland, he met with an abler adversary in General Massena; still I am inclined to think that he displayed there more real talents than any where else; and that this part of his campaign of 1799, was the most interesting, in a military point of view.

The most implacable enemies of the politics of the House of Austria render justice to the plans, to the frankness, to the morality of Archduke Charles; and what is remarkable, of all the chiefs who have commanded against revolutionary France, he alone has seized the true manner of combating enthusiasts or slaves; at least his proclamations are the only ones composed with adroitness, and are what they ought to be; because in them an appeal is made to the public opinion, in a time where opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies.

The present opposer of this Prince in Italy, is one of our best as well as most fortunate Generals. A Sardinian subject, and a deserter from the Sardinian troops, he assisted, in 1792, our commander General Anselm, in the conquest of the country of Nice, rather as a spy than as a soldier. His knowledge of the Maritime Alps obtained, in 1793, a place on our staff, where, from the services he rendered, the rank of a general of brigade was soon conferred on him. In 1796, he was promoted to serve as a general of division under Buonaparte in Italy, where he dis

tinguished himself so much, that when, in 1798, Gep eral Berthier was ordered to accompany the army of the East to Egypt, he succeeded him as commander in chief of our troops, in the temporary Roman Republic. But his merciless pillage, and perhaps the idea of his being a foreigner, brought on a mutiny, and the Directory was obliged to recall him. It was his campaign in Switzerland, of 1799, and his defence of Genoa, in 1800,. that principally ranked him high as a military chief. After the battle of Marengo, he received the command of the army of Italy, but his extortions produced a revolt among the inhabitants; and he lived for some time in retreat and disgrace, after a violent quarrel with Buonaparte, during which many severe truths were said and heard on both sides.

After the peace of Luneville, he seemed inclined to join Moreau and other discontented generals; but observing, no doubt, their want of views and union, he retired to an estate he has bought near Paris; where Buonaparte visited him, after the rupture with your country, and made him, we may conclude, such offers as tempted him to leave his retreat. Last year he was nominated one of our Emperor's field-marshals, and as such he relieved Jourdan of the command in the kingdom of Italy. He has purchased with a part of his spoil, for fifteen millions of livres, 625,000l. property, in France and Italy; and is considered worth double that sum in jewels, money, and other valu ables.

Massena is called in France, the spoiled child of fortune; and as Buonaparte, like our former Cardinal Mazarin, has more confi dence in fortune than in merit, he is perhaps more indebted to the former than to the latter for his present situation; his familiarity has made him disliked at our Imperial court, where he never addresses Napoleone and Madame Buonaparte as an Emperor or an Empress, without smiling.

General St. Cyr, our second in command of the army of Italy, is also an officer of great talents and distinction. He was, in 1791, only a cornet, but, in 1795, he headed, as a general, a division of the army of the Rhine. In his report to the Directory, during the famous retreat of 1796, Moreau speaks highly of this general, and admits that his achievements, in part, saved the republican army. During 1799, he served in Italy; and in 1800,