MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN. PART XVIII. "Have I not in my time heard lions roar? Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in the pitched battle heard Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"

Shakspeare.

On returning to London I found the world in the "transition state." The spirit of the people was changed; the nature of the war was changed; the principle of the great parties in the legislature was changed. A new era of the contest had arrived; and, in the midst of the general perplexity as to the nature of the approaching events, every one exhibited a conviction, that when they came their magnitude would turn all the struggles of the past into child's play.

I, too, had my share in the change. I had now passed my public novitiate, and had obtained my experience of statesmanship on a scale, if too small for history, yet sufficiently large to teach me the working of the machinery. National conspiracy, the council-chamber, popular ebullition, and the tardy but powerful action of public justice, had been my tutors; and I was now felt, by the higher powers, to be not unfit for trust in a larger field. A seat in the English House of Commons soon enabled me to give satisfactory evidence that I had not altogether overlooked the character of the crisis; and, after some interviews with the premier, his approval of my conduct in Ireland was followed by the proposal of office, with a seat in the cabinet.

I had thus attained, in the vigour of life, a distinction for which hundreds, perhaps thousands, had laboured through life in vain. But mine was no couch of rosy prosperity. The period was threatening. The old days of official repose were past, never to return. The state of Europe was hourly assuming an aspect of the deepest peril. The war had hitherto been but the struggle of armies; it now threatened to be the struggle of nations. It had hitherto lived on the natural resources of public expenditure; it now began to prey upon the vitals of the kingdom. The ordinary finance of England was to be succeeded by demands pressing heavily on the existing generation, and laying a hereditary burden on all that were to follow. The nature of our antagonist deepened the difficulty. All the common casualties of nations were so far from breaking the enemy down, that they only gave him renewed power. Poverty swelled his ranks; confiscation swelled his coffers; bankruptcy gave him strength; faction invigorated his government; and insubordination made him invincible. In the midst of this confusion, even a new terror arose. The democracy of France, after startling Europe, had seemed to be sinking into feebleness and apathy, when a new wonder appeared in the political hemisphere, too glaring and too ominous to suffer our eyes to turn from it for a moment. The Consulate assumed the rule of France. Combining the fiery vigour of republicanism with the perseverance of monarchy, it now carried the whole force of the country into foreign fields. Every foreign capital began to tremble. The whole European system shook before a power which smote it with the force of a cannon-ball against a crumbling bastion. The extraordinary man who now took the lead in France, had touched the string which vibrated in the heart of every native of the soil. He had found them weary of the crimes of the democracy; he told them that a career of universal supremacy was open before them. He had found them degraded by the consciousness of riot and regicide; he told them that they were the chevaliers of the new age, and destined to eclipse the chevaliers of all the ages past. His Italian campaigns, by their rapidity, their fine combinations, and their astonishing success, had created a new art of war. He had brought them romantic triumphs from the land of romance. Day by day the populace of the capital were summoned to see pageants of Italian standards, cannon, and prisoners. Every courier that galloped through the streets brought tidings of some new conquest; and every meeting of the Councils was employed in announcing the addition of some classic province, the overthrow of some hostile diadem, or the arrival of some convoy of those most magnificent of all the spoils of war, the treasures of the Italian arts. France began to dream of the conquest of the world.

The contrast between her past calamities and her present splendour, powerfully heightened the illusion. France loves illusion; she has always rejoiced in glittering deceptions, even with the perfect knowledge that they were deceptions; and here stood the most dazzling of political charlatans, the great wonder-worker, raising phantoms of national glory even out of the charnel. The wrecks of faction, the remnants of the monarchy, and the corpses lying headless in the shadow of the guillotine, gave all semblance to the conception—France was a charnel. Her people, by nature rushing into extremes, wild and fierce, yet gallant and generous, had become at length conscious of the national fall in the eyes of Europe. They had been scandalized by the rudeness, the baseness, and the brutishness, of rabble supremacy. They gazed upon their own crimsoned hands and tarnished weapons with intolerable disgust; and it was in this moment of depression that they saw a sudden beam of military renown shot across the national darkness. After so long defeat that it had extinguished all but the memory of her old triumphs, France was a conqueror; after a century of helpless exhaustion, she had risen into almost supernatural vigour; after a hundred years, scarcely marked by a single victory, her capital rang with the daily sound of successful battles against the veterans of Frederick and Maria Theresa; after lingering for generations in the obscurity so bitter to the popular heart, France had been suddenly thrown into the broadest lustre of European sovereignty. The world was changed; and the limits of that change offered only a more resistless lure to the popular passion, for their being still indistinct to the keenest eye of man.

But our chief struggle was at home, and the reaction of our foreign disasters came with terrible weight upon a cabinet already tottering. We saw its fate. Days and nights of the most anxious consultation, could not relieve us from the hourly increasing evidence, that the Continent was on the verge of ruin. The voice of Opposition, reinforced by the roar of the multitude, could no longer be shut out by the curtains of the council-chamber. Fox, always formidable, was never more confident and more popular, than when he made the House ring with prophecies of national downfall. His attacks were now incessant. He flung his hand-grenades night after night into our camp, and constantly with still greater damage. We still fought, but it was the fight of despair. Pitt was imperturbable; but there was not one among his colleagues who did not feel the hopelessness of calling for public reliance, when, in every successive debate, we heard the leader of Opposition contemptuously asking, what answer we had to the Gazette crowded with bankruptcy? to the resolutions of great bodies of the people denouncing the war? or to the deadly evidence of its effects in the bulletin which he held in his hand, announcing some new defeat of our allies; some new treaty of submission; some new barter of provinces for the precarious existence of foreign thrones?

In all my recollections of public life, this was the period of the deepest perplexity. The name of the great minister has been humiliated by those who judge of the past only by the present. But then all was new. The general eye of statesmanship had been deceived by the formal grandeur of the continential sovereignties. They had lain untouched, like the bodies of their kings, with all their armour on, and with every feature unchanged; and such they might have remained for ages to come, had not a new force broken open their gilded and sculptured shrines, torn off their cerements, and exposed them to the light and air. Then a touch extinguished them; the armour dropped into dust; the royal robes dissolved; the royal features disappeared; and the whole illusion left nothing but its moral behind.

It can be no dishonour to the memory of the first of statesmen, to acknowledge that he had not the gift of prophecy. Europe had never before seen a war of the people. The burning passions, rude vigour, and remorseless daring of the multitude, were phenomena of which man knows no more than he knows of the materials of destruction which lie hid in the central caverns of the globe, and which some new era may be suffered to develope, for the new havoc of posterity. Even to this hour, I think that the true source of revolutionary triumph has been mistaken. It was not in the furious energy of its factions, nor in the wild revenge of the people, nor even in the dazzling view of national conquest. These were but gusts of the popular tempest, currents of the great popular tide. But the mighty mover of all was the sudden change from the disgusts and depressions of serfdom, into a sense that all the world of possession lay before the bold heart and the ruthless hand. Every form of wealth and enjoyment was offered to the man who had begun life in the condition of one chained to the ground, and who could never have hoped to change his toil but for the grave. But the barrier was now cast down, and all were free to rush in. The treasury of national honours was suddenly flung open, and all might share the spoil. This was the true secret of the astonishing power of the Revolution. The man who was nothing to-day, might be everything to-morrow. The conscript might be a captain, a colonel, a general, before the Austrian or Prussian soldier could be a corporal. Who can wonder at the march of France, or the flight of her enemies?

Although every night now produced a debate, and the demand on the activity and vigilance of ministers was incessant and exhausting, the real debates in both Houses were few in comparison with those of later times. In those pitched battles of the great parties, their whole strength was mustered from every quarter; the question was long announced; and its decision was regarded as giving the most complete measure of the strength of the Cabinet and Opposition. One of these nights came, unfortunately for ministers, on the very day in which the bulletin arrived, announcing the signature of the first Austrian armistice. The passage of the Tyrol had stripped Austria of its mountain barrier. Terror had done the rest; and the armistice was signed within three marches of Vienna! The courier who had been sent to the Austrian ambassador, and had been permitted to pass through France, reported the whole nation to be in a frenzy of triumph. He had every where seen civic processions, military displays, and illuminations in the cities. The exultation of the people had risen to the utmost height of national enthusiasm; and Europe was pronounced, by every Frenchman, from the Directory to the postilion, to be at their feet.

This intelligence was all but fatal. If a shower of cannon-balls had been poured in upon the ministerial benches, it could scarcely have produced a more sweeping effect. It was clear that the sagacity of the "independent members"—only another name for the most flexible portion of the House—was fully awake to the contingency; the "waiters upon Providence," as they were called, with no very reverent allusion, were evidently on the point of deciding for themselves; and the "King's friends"—a party unknown to the constitution, but perfectly knowing, and known by, the treasury—began to move away by small sections; and, crowded as the clubs were during the day, I never saw the minister rise with so few of his customary troops behind him. But the Opposition bench was crowded to repletion; and their leader sat looking round with good-humoured astonishment, and sometimes with equally good-humoured burlesque, on the sudden increase of his recruits. The motion was in answer to a royal message on continental subsidies. Nothing could have been more difficult than the topic at that juncture. But I never listened to Pitt with more genuine admiration. Fox, in his declamatory bursts, was superior to every speaker whom I have ever heard. His appearance of feeling was irresistible. It seemed that, if one could have stripped his heart, it could scarcely have shown its pulsations more vividly to the eye, than they transpired from his fluent and most eloquent tongue. But if Fox was the most powerful of declaimers, Pitt was the mightiest master of the language of national council. He, too, could be occasionally glowing and imaginative. He could even launch the lighter weapons of sarcasm with singular dexterity; but his true rank was as the ruler of Empire, and his true talent was never developed but when he spoke for the interests of Empire.

On this night he was more earnest and more impressive than ever; the true description would have been, more imperial. He spoke, less like a debater, than like one who held the sceptre in his hand; and one who also felt that he was transmitting his wisdom as a parting legacy to a great people.

A portion of that speech, which ought never to be forgotten by the leaders of public affairs in England, was singularly full and powerful. Referring to the calumniated Revolution of 1688—"We now stand," said he, "almost in the same position with respect to France and Europe, in which the government of William III. stood a century ago. We have only to substitute the democracy of France for the monarchy; and Europe enfeebled by the shocks of war, as it is now, for Europe untouched and intrepid, awake to the ambition of the French king, and determined to meet him sword in hand. But the King of England was even then the guiding mind of Europe. I now demand, what was the redeeming policy of that pre-eminent sovereign? It was, never to despair of the triumph of principle; never to doubt of the ultimate fortunes of good in a contest with evil; and never to hesitate in calling upon a great and free people for the defence of that constitution which had made them great and free."

Those high-toned sentiments were received with loud cheers. Even Opposition felt the natural force of the appeal, and the cheering was universal; party was forgotten for the time, and the name of England, and the revived glory of those illustrious days, bowed the whole House at the will of the great orator. In the midst of their enthusiasm, he took from the table a volume of the records, and read the final address of William to his Parliament; the bequest of a dying king to the people whom he had rescued from slavery. This royal speech had evidently formed his manual of government, and, certainly, a nobler declaration never came from the throne.

Daylight shone on the windows of St Stephen's before the debate closed. The minister had retired immediately after his exhausting speech, and left his friends to sustain the combat. It was long and fierce; but Opposition was again baffled, and the division gave us a lingering majority. It was now too late, or too early, to go to rest; and I had returned to my official apartments, to look over some returns required for the next council, when, my friend the secretary tapped at my door. His countenance looked care-worn; and for a few moments after he had sat down, he remained in total silence, with his forehead resting on his hands. This was so unlike the cheerful spirit of former times—times in which he had seemed to defy, or almost to enjoy, the struggles of public life—that I began to express alarm for his health. But he interrupted me by a look of the deepest distress, and the words "Pitt is dying." No words could be fuller of ill omen, and my anxiety was equal to his own. "My meaning," said he, "is not, that he must die to-day, or to-morrow, nor in six months, nor perhaps in a year, but that the statesman is dead. He must speak no more, act no more, and even think no more, or he must go to his grave. This night has finished the long supremacy of the noblest mind that ever ruled the councils of this country. William Pitt may live, but the minister has finished his days."

"Yet," I remarked, "I never heard him more animated or more impressive than on this night. He absolutely broke down all resistance. His mind seemed richer than ever, and his combination of facts and reasoning appeared to me unequalled by even his greatest previous efforts. I should have almost pronounced him to be inspired by the increased difficulties of the time."

"True—yet I conveyed him from the House, fainting;—I have sate, along with his physician, at his bedside ever since, applying restoratives to him, with scarcely a hope of recovery. It is plain that another night of such effort would be too much for his frame; and the question on which I have now come to summon an immediate meeting of our friends, turns on the means of calming public opinion until he shall be able to appear in his place once more. His career is unquestionably at an end, but his name is powerful still; and though another trial of his powers in Parliament would cost him his life, still, as the head of the cabinet, he might effect, for a while, all the principal purposes of an administration."

I doubted the possibility of encountering the present strength of Opposition, reinforced, as it was, by calamity abroad, and asked, "Whether any expedient was contemplated, to restore the public fortunes on the Continent?"

"Every point of that kind has been long since considered," was the answer. "Our alliances have all failed; and we are now reproached, not simply with the folly of paying for inefficient help, but with the cruelty of dragging the states of Europe into a contest, where to be crushed was inevitable."

I still urged an enquiry into the strength of states which had never been sharers in the war. "If the minor German powers have been absorbed; if Prussia has abandoned the cause; if Austria has fought in vain—is the world included in Germany?" I threw the map of Europe on the table. "See what a narrow circle comprehends the whole space to which we have hitherto limited the defence of society against the enemy of all social order. Our cause is broader than Austria and Prussia; it is broader than Europe; it is the cause of civilization itself; and why not summon all civilization to its defence? Russia alone has an army of half a million, yet she has never fired a shot." Still, I found it difficult to convince my fellow minister.

"Russia—jealous, ambitious, and Asiatic; Russia, with the Eastern world for her natural field—what object can she have in relieving the broken powers of the Continent? Must she not rather rejoice in the defeats and convulsions which leave them at her mercy?" I still continued to urge him.

"Rely upon it; it is in the North that we must look for the reinforcement. If the councils of Catharine were crafty, the councils of her successor may be sincere. Catharine thought only of the seizure of Turkey; Paul may think only of the profits of commerce. Yet, is it altogether justifiable to suppose that monarchs may not feel the same sympathies, the same principles of honour—nay, the same abhorrence of a sanguinary republicanism—which a private individual might feel in any other instance of oppression?"

"Still, Marston, I am at a loss to know by what influence a British government could urge a Russian despotism into a contest, a thousand miles from its frontier; in which it can gain no accession of territory, and but little accession of military fame; and all this, while it is itself perfectly secure from all aggression."

"All true; but remember the striking commencement of Voltaire's Memoir of Peter—'Who could have pretended to say, in the year 1700, that a magnificent and polished court would be formed at the extremity of the Gulf of Finland; that the inhabitants of Cazan and the banks of the Wolga would be ranked among disciplined warriors, and, after beating the Turk and the Swede, gain victories in Germany? That a desert of two thousand leagues in length, should, in the space of fifty years, extend its influence to all the European courts; and that, in 1759, the most zealous patron of literature in Europe should be a Russian sovereign? The man who had said this would have been regarded as the most chimerical mortal on earth.' But all this has been done, and the career is not closed. More will be done still. It may even be our most essential policy to bring Russia into full collision with France. She is now the only rival: and I shall scarcely regret the fall of the German sovereignties, if it clears the field, to bring face to face the two great powers which hold at their sword's point the fate of the Continent."

A month passed, of perpetual difficulty in the cabinet, of ill news from abroad, and of violent discontents among the people. A deficient harvest had come, to increase the national murmurs; a season of peculiar inclemency had added its share to the public vexations; and I fully experienced the insufficiency of office, and of the showy honours of courts, to constitute happiness. But a new scene was reserved for me. Casual as my conversation with the secretary of state had been, it was not forgotten: it had been related to the minister; and it had so far coincided with the conceptions of a mind, which seemed to comprehend every chance of human things, that I was shortly sent for, to enter into the necessary explanations. The result was, the offer of a mission to St Petersburg. The proposal was so unexpected, that I required time for my answer. I must abandon high employment at home for a temporary distinction abroad; my knowledge of Russia was slight; the character of the Czar was eccentric; and the success of an embassy, dependent on the most capricious of mankind, was so uncertain, that the result might strip me of whatever credit I already possessed.

But, there was one authority, to which I always appealed. I placed the proposal in the hands of Clotilde; and she settled all my doubts at once, by declaring, "that it was the appointment which, if she had been suffered to choose, she would have selected, in preference to all others, for its honour and its services." I had no power to resist such pleadings—seconded as they were by the rosiest smiles, and the most beaming eyes. But Clotilde was still the woman, and I only valued her the more for it.—Her sincerity had not a thought to hide; and she acknowledged her delight at the prospect of once more treading on the soil of the Continent; at gazing even on the borders of her native land, excluded as she might be from its entrance; at the enjoyment of seeing continental life in the brilliant animation of its greatest court; and at mingling with the scene in a rank which entitled her to its first distinctions.

"But, Clotilde, how will you reconcile your tastes to the wild habits of Russia, and even to the solemn formalities of a northern court?"

"They both present themselves to me," was her answer, "with the charm at once of novelty and recollection. From my nursery days, the names of Peter, Catharine, and their marvellous city, rang in the ears of all Paris. Romance had taken refuge at the pole; Voltaire, Buffon, D'Alembert—all the wit, and all the philosophy of France—satirized the French court under the disguise of Russian panegyric; and St Petersburg was to us the modern Babylon—a something compounded of the wildness of a Scythian desert, and the lustre of a Turkish tale."

The ministerial note had been headed "most secret and confidential," and as such I had regarded it. But I soon saw the difficulty of keeping "a state secret." I had scarcely sent in my acceptance of the appointment, when I found a letter on my table from my old Israelite friend, Mordecai, congratulating me on "my decision." It was in his usual abrupt style:—

I visited him "in his den;" and it deserved the name as much as ever. Not a pane had been cleared of its dinginess; not a cobweb had been swept from its ceiling; nothing had been removed, except the pair of living skeletons who once acted as his attendants. They had been removed by the Remover of all things; and were succeeded by a pair, so similar in meagreness and oddity of appearance, that I could not have known the change, except for its mention by their master, congratulating himself on being so "fortunate" in finding substitutes. I found Mordecai immersed in day-books and ledgers, and calculating the exchanges with as much anxiety as if he were not worth a shilling. But his look was more languid than before, and his powerful eye seemed to have sunk deeper beneath his brow.

"You are probably surprised at seeing me here;" said he, "but I have more reason than ever to be here. There is a time for all things, but not if we throw it away. My last excursion to Poland has revived my zeal in behalf of my nation; and as years advance on me, like the rest of the world, I find that I must only exert myself the more."

"But, Mordecai, you are opulent; you can have no necessity for abandoning the natural indulgences of life. You will only shorten your days by this toil. At least why do you linger in this dungeon?"

He smiled grimly. "It is a dungeon, and I only value it the more. To this dungeon, as you call it, come, day by day, some of the haughtiest names of the land. If I lived in some west-end Square, with my drawing-room filled with Louis Quatorze gew-gaws, and half-a-dozen idle fellows in livery to announce my visitors, I should not feel the hundredth part of the sense of superiority, the contemptuous triumph, the cool consciousness of the tyranny of gold, which I feel when I see my shrinking supplicants sitting down among my dusty boxes and everlasting cobwebs. I shall not suffer a grain of dust to be cleared away. It is my pride—it is my power—it is my revenge."

His visage assumed so completely the expression which I had always imagined for Shylock, that I should scarcely have been surprised if I had seen him produce the knife and the scales.

"You are surprised at all this," said he after a pause, in which he fixed his searching eyes on me. "I see by your countenance, that you think me a Goth, a monster, a savage.—I think myself none of those things. I am a man; and, if I am not much deceived, I am also a philosopher. My life has been a perpetual struggle through a world where every one worships self. My nation are scorned, and they struggle too. The Jew has been injured, not by the individual alone, but by all mankind; and has he not a right to his revenge? He has at last found the means. He is now absorbing the wealth of all nations. With the wealth he will have the power; and another half century will not elapse, before all the grand questions of public council—nay, of national existence—must depend on the will of the persecuted sons of Abraham. Who shall rise, or who shall fall; who shall make war, or who shall obtain peace; what republic shall be created, or what monarchy shall be rent in pieces—will henceforth be the questions, not of cabinets, but of the 'Change. There are correspondences within this escritoire, worth all the wisdom of all the ministers of earth. There are commands at the point of this pen, which the proudest statesmanship dares not controvert. There is in the chests round you a ruler more powerful than ever before held the sceptre—the dictator of the globe; the true Despot is Gold."

After this wild burst, he sank into silence; until, to change the fever of his thoughts, I enquired for the health of his daughter. The father's heart overcame him again.

"My world threatens to be a lonely one, Mr Marston," said he in a feeble voice. "You see a heartbroken man. Forgive the bitterness with which I have spoken. Mariamne, I fear, is dying; and what is wealth now to me? I have left her in Poland among my people. She seemed to feel some slight enjoyment in wandering from place to place; but her last letter tells me that she is wearied of travelling, and has made up her mind to live and die where she may be surrounded by her unhappy nation. I remain here only to wind up my affairs, and in a week I quit England—and for ever."

But a new object caught my glance. Mordecai—who, while he was thus speaking in paroxysms of alternate indignation and sorrow, had never for a moment ceased to turn over his books and boxes—had accidentally shaken a pile of tin cases from its pinnacle, and the whole rolled down at my feet. On one of them I saw, with no very strong surprise, the words—"Mortgage—Mortimer Castle." The eyes of both glanced in the same direction.

"There," said the Israelite, "you have your paternal acres in your hand—your Plantagenet forests, and your Tudor castle, all in a cubic foot. On the chair where you are now sitting, your lordly brother sat yesterday, gathering up his skirts from the touch of every thing round him, and evidently suffering all the torture of a man of fashion, forced to smile on the holder of his last mortgage. He is ruined—not worth a sixpence; Melton and Newmarket have settled that question for him. But do you recognise that hand?" He drew a letter from his portfolio. I knew the writing: it was from my mother—on whom, now old and feeble, this accomplished rouÉ had been urging the sale of her jointure. Helpless and alone, she had consented to this fatal measure; and my noble brother's visit to the Israelite had been for the purpose of inducing him to make the purchase.

I started up in indignation; declared that the result must reduce my unfortunate parent to beggary; and demanded by what means I could possibly prevent what was "neither more nor less than an act of plunder."

"I see no means," said Mordecai coolly, "except your making the purchase yourself, and thus securing the jointure to her ladyship. It is only ten thousand pounds."

"I make the purchase! I have not the tenth part of the money upon earth. I ask you, what is to be done?"

"Your brother has here the power of selling—and will sell, if the starvation of fifty mothers stood in his way. Newmarket suffers no qualms of that kind; and, when his matters there are settled, his coachmaker's bill for landaulets and britchskas will make him a pedestrian for the rest of his life. But I have refused the purchase; and it was chiefly on this subject that I was induced to invite you to my 'dungeon,' as you not unjustly term it."

The picture of a mother, of whom I had always thought with the tenderness of a child, cast out in her old age to poverty, with the added bitterness of being thus cast out by her reliance on the honour of a cruel and treacherous son, rose before my eyes with such pain, that I absolutely lost all power of speech, and could only look the distress which I felt. Mordecai gazed on me with an enquiring countenance.

"You love this mother, Mr Marston. You are a good son. We Israelites, with all our faults, respect the feelings which 'honour the father and the mother.' It is a holy love, and well earned by the cares and sorrows of parentage." He paused, and covered his forehead with his gigantic hands. I could hear him murmur the name of his daughter. The striking of a neighbouring church clock startled him from his reverie.

Suddenly again bustling among his papers, he said—"Within this half hour, your brother is to call again for my definitive answer. Now, listen to me. The jointure shall be purchased." I bit my lip; but he did not leave me long in suspense—"And you shall be the purchaser." He wrote a cheque for the amount, and placed it in my hand.

"Mordecai, you are a noble fellow! But how am I to act upon this? I am worth nothing. I might as well attempt to repay millions."

"Well, so be it, Mr Marston. You are a man of honor, and a good son. You will repay it when you can. I exact but one condition: that you will come and visit Mariamne and me in Poland."

A loud knock at the hall-door put an end to our interview.

"That is your brother," said he. "You must not see him, as I choose to keep the name of the purchaser to myself. Take your mother's letter with you; and give her my best advice to write no more—at least to such correspondents as his lordship."

I rose to take my leave. He followed me hastily; and, taking me by the hand, said—"Another condition I have to make. It is, that not a syllable of all that has passed between us on this subject shall be suffered to transpire. I should make but a bad figure on 'Change, if I were suspected of transactions in that style. Remember, it must be a profound secret to all the world."

"Even to my wife?" I asked. "Is she included?"

"No, no," he replied, with a faint laugh; "I look upon you as a mere mortal still. All vows are void in their nature, which require impossibilities in their execution." We parted.

I told my little city tale to Clotilde. She wept and smiled alternately, as I told it. Mordecai received all his due praise; and we pledged ourselves to find out his Mariamne, in whatever corner of the Lithuanian wilderness she might have hidden her fantastic heart and head. But I had now another duty. Within a few hours, we were on our way to the jointure-house. It was a picturesque old building, the residence of the Father Abbot, in the times before the insatiable hand of Somerset had fallen upon the monasteries. We reached it in the twilight of a gentle day, when all its shrubs and flowers were filling the air with freshness and fragrance. I found my mother less enfeebled than I had expected; and still affectionate and tender, as she had always been to her long-absent son. She was still fully susceptible of the honours which had now opened before me. Clotilde almost knelt before her noble air and venerable beauty. My mother could not grow weary with gazing on the expressive countenance of my beautiful wife. I had secured my parent's comfort for life; and I, too, was happy.

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My embassy, like all other embassies, had its vexations; but on the whole I had reason to congratulate myself on its acceptance. My reception at St Petersburg was most distinguished; I had arrived at a fortunate period. The French expedition to Egypt had alarmed the Russian councils for Constantinople; a possession to which every Russian looks, in due time, as naturally as to the right of his copecks and caftan. But the victory of Aboukir, which had destroyed the French fleet, again raised the popular exultation, and English heroism was the topic of every tongue. The incomparable campaign of the Russian army in Italy; the recovery, in three months, of all which it had cost the power of France, and the genius of her greatest general, in two years of pitched battles, sanguinary sieges, artful negotiation, and incessant intrigue, to obtain, excited the nation to the highest degree of enthusiasm, and the embassy basked in the broadest sunshine of popularity. FÊte now succeeded fÊte; the standards taken in Suwarrow's battles, the proudest trophies ever won by Russian arms, were carried in procession to the cathedral; illuminations of the capital, balls in the palaces, and public sports on the waters and banks of the Neva, kept St Petersburg in a perpetual tumult of joy.

But all was not sunshine: the character of the sovereign in a despotism demands perpetual study; and Paul was freakish and headstrong beyond all human calculation. No man was more misunderstood at a distance, nor less capable of being understood near. He had some striking qualities. He was generous, bold, and high-principled; but the simplest accident would turn all those qualities into their reverse. To-day he was ready to devote himself to the cause of Europe; every soldier of Russia must march: but, when the morrow came, he revoked the order for his troops, and cashiered the secretaries who had been rash enough to take him at his word. The secret was in his brain; disease was gathering on his intellect, and he was daily becoming dangerous to those nearest him. The result was long foreseen. In Spain, Gil Blas recommends that no man who wishes for long life should quarrel with his cook. In Russia, let no Czar rouse the suspicions of his courtiers. As the Pagans hung chaplets on the statues of their gods in victory, and flogged them in defeat, the Russians, in every casualty of their arms, turned a scowling eye upon their liege lord: and the retreat of Suwarrow, the greatest of Russian soldiers, from Switzerland, at once stripped the Emperor of all his popularity.

My position now became doubly anxious. Even despots love popularity, and the Czar was alternately furious and frightened at its loss. Guards were planted in every part of the city, with orders to disperse all groups. Every man who looked at the Imperial equipage as it passed through the streets, was in danger of being arrested as an assassin. Nobles were suddenly exiled—none knew why, or where. The cloud was thickening round the palace. It is a perilous thing to be the one object on which every eye involuntary turns, as the cause of public evil. Rumours of conspiracy rose and died, and were heard again. In free governments public discontents have room to escape, and they escape. In despotisms they have no room to evaporate, and they condense until they explode. St Petersburg at length became a place of silence and solitude by day, and of murmurs and meetings by night. It reminded one of Rome in the days of Nero; and I looked with perpetual alarm for the catastrophe of Nero.

The Russian is a submissive man, and even capable of strong attachment to the throne: but there is no spot of the earth where national injury is more deeply resented; and Paul had been regarded as tarnishing the fame of Russia. His abandonment of Suwarrow—a warrior, of whom the annals of the Russian army will bear record to the end of time—had stung all classes. More than a soldier, Suwarrow was a great military genius. He gained battles without tactics, and in defiance of them. He had astonished the Austrian generals by the fierce rapidity of his movements; he had annihilated the French armies in Italy by the desperate daring of his attacks. Wherever Suwarrow came, he was conqueror. In his whole career he had never been beaten. The soldiery told numberless tales of his eccentricity—laughed at, mimicked, and adored him. The nation honoured him as the national warrior. But the failure of some of his detached corps in Switzerland had embarrassed the campaign; and Paul, capricious as the winds, hastily recalled him. The popular indignation now burst out in every form of anger. Placards fixed at night on the palace walls; gipsy ballads sung in the streets; maskers, at the countless balls of the nobles; satires in quaint verse, and national proverbs, showed the public resentment to be universal. Every incident furnished some contemptuous comment. The Czar had built a wing to one of the palaces of Catharine. The addition wanted the stateliness of the original fabric. This epigram was posted on the building, in angry Slavonic:—

In the midst of this growing perplexity, the English messenger arrived. His tidings had been long anticipated, yet they came with the effect of a thunderclap. The cabinet had resigned! I of course now waited only for my order to return. But, in the mean time, this event formidably increased the difficulties of my position. Foreigners will never allow themselves to comprehend the nature of any English transaction whatever. They deal with them all as if they were scenes on a stage. In the incorrigible absurdity of their theatrical souls, they imagine a parliamentary defeat to be a revolution, and the change of a ministry the fall of an empire. Paul instantly cast off all his old partialities. He pronounced England undone. The star of France was to be the light of the west; he himself to be the luminary of the east. The bold ambition of Catharine was to be realized; however, without the system or the sagacity of her imperial genius. But Paul was to learn the terrible lesson of a despotic government. The throne separated from the people, is the more in peril the more widely it is separated. The people would not be carried along with their master to the feet of his new political idol. The substantial virtues of the national character resisted that French alliance, which must be begun at once by prostration and ingratitude. France was their new taunter. England was their old ally. They hated France for its republican insolence; they honoured England for its resolute determination to fight out the battle, not for its own sake alone, but for the cause of all nations. Paul, in the attempt to partition the globe, was narrowing his supremacy to his own sepulchre.

Yet, this time of national gloom was the most splendid period of the court. With the double purpose of recovering his popularity, and concealing his negotiations, Paul plunged into the most extraordinary festivity. Balls, masquerades, and fÊtes succeeded each other with restless extravagance. But the contrast of the saturnine Emperor with the sudden change of his court was too powerful. It bore the look of desperation; though for what purpose, was still a mystery to the million. I heard many a whisper among the diplomatic circle, that this whirl of life, this hot and fierce dissipation, was, in all Russian reigns, the sure precursor of a catastrophe; though none could yet venture to predict its nature. It was like the furious and frenzied indulgence of a crew in a condemned ship, breaking up the chests and drinking the liquors, in the conviction that none would survive the voyage. Even I, with all my English disregard of the speculative frivolities which to the foreigner are substance and facts, was startled by the increasing glare of those hurried and feverish festivities. More than once, as I entered the imperial saloon, crowded with the civil and military uniforms of every court of Europe, and exhibiting at once European taste and Asiatic magnificence, I could scarcely suppress the feeling that I was only entering the most stately of theatres; where, with all the temporary glitter of the stage, the sounds of the orchestra, and the passion and poetry of the characters—the fifth act was preparing, and the curtain was to fall on the death of nobles and kings.

The impression that evil was to come, already seemed to be universal. Rumours of popular conspiracy, fresh discoveries by the police, and new tales of imperial eccentricity, kept the public mind in constant fitfulness. At length, I received the formal communication of a "challenge" from the Czar to my sovereign, along with all the other crowned heads of Europe, to meet him in a champ-clos, and, sword in hand, decide the quarrels of nations. With this despatch came an invitation for the whole diplomatic body to a masquerade! in which all were commanded to appear as knights in armour—the Czar, as grand-master of the Order of Malta, exhibiting himself in the panoply in which he was to settle the disputes of mankind.

Perplexities like those form a large share of the trials of the foreign ambassador. To attend the fÊte was embarrassing; but to decline the invitation, would have been equivalent to demanding my passports. And I must acknowledge, that if the eye was to be gratified by the most superb and the most curious of all displays, never was there an occasion more fitted for its indulgence. All the armouries of Europe, and of Asia, seemed to have been searched for the arms and ornaments of this assemblage. The Kremlin had given up its barbaric shields and caps of bronze; the plate-mail of the Crusader; the gold-inlaid morions and cuirasses of France; the silver chain-mail of the Circassian; the steel corslet of the German chivalry; and a whole host of the various and rich equipments of the Greek, the Hungarian, the Moresco, and the Turkoman, made the Winter palace a blaze of knighthood.

Yet, to me, after the first excitement, the whole conveyed a deep impression of melancholy. It irresistibly reminded me of the last ceremonial of dead sovereigns, the "Chapelle Ardente." Even the curtains which fell round the throne, fringed with jewels as they were, to me looked funereal. The immense golden candelabra were to me the lights round a bier. I almost imagined that I could see the sword and sceptre laid across the coffin, and all of the Lord of Empire that remained, a corpse within.

I was roused from my reluctant reverie by the approach of a group of masks, who came dancing towards the recess where I had retired, wearied with the general noise, and the exhaustion of the fÊte. One of the casements opened into the famous Conservatory; and I was enjoying the scents of the thousand flowers and shrubs, of, perhaps, the finest collection in the world. But, in the shade, the group had evidently overlooked me; for they began to speak of matters which they could not have designed for a stranger's ear. The conduct of the Czar, the wrongs of Russia, and the "necessity of coming to a decision," were the topics. Suddenly, as if to avert suspicion, one of the group struck up a popular air on the little three-stringed guitar which throws the Russian crowd into such ecstasies; and they began a dance, accompanying it by a murmuring chorus, which soon convinced me of the dangerous neighbourhood into which I had fallen. The words became well known afterwards. No language excels the Russian in energy; but I must give them in the weakness of a translation.

My conviction was complete, when, in the whirl of the dance, a small roll of paper dropped from the robe of one of the maskers, and fell at my feet. In taking it up to return it to him, I saw that it was a list of names, and, at the head, a name which, from private information, I knew to be involved in dark political purposes. The thought flashed across me, in connexion with the chorus which I had just heard, that the paper was of too much importance to be suffered to leave my possession.—The life of the sovereign might be involved. The group, who had been evidently startled by my sudden appearance among them, now surrounded me, and the loser of the paper insisted on its instant surrender. The violence of his demand only confirmed my resolution. He grew more agitated still, and the group seized me. I laid my hand upon my sword. This measure stopped them for the moment. But in the next, I saw a knife brandished in the air, and felt myself wounded in the arm. My attempt to grasp the weapon had alone saved me from its being buried in my heart. But the fracas now attracted notice; a crowd rushed towards us, and the group suddenly scattered away, leaving me still in possession of the paper. My wound bled, and I felt faint, and desired to be led into the open air. My mask was taken off; and this was scarcely done when I heard my name pronounced, and saw the welcome countenance of my friend Guiscard by my side. He had arrived but on that day, on a mission from his court; had, with his usual eagerness of friendship, gone to enquire for me at the hotel of the embassy; and thus followed me to the fÊte at the critical time. As he supported me to my equipage, I communicated the circumstances of the rencontre to his clear head and generous heart; and he fully agreed with me on the duty of instantly apprising the Czar of his probable danger. As I was unable to move through pain and feebleness, he offered to take the roll with him, and demand an interview with the sovereign himself, if possible; or, if not, with the governor of the palace. The paper contained not only names of individuals, all, long before, objects of public suspicion, but a sketch of the imperial apartments, and, at the bottom, the words—"three hours after midnight." I looked at my watch, it was already half-past two. This might, or might not be, the appointed night for this dreadful business; but, if it were, there was but one half hour between the throne and the grave. Guiscard hurried off, leaving me in the deepest anxiety, but promising to return as speedily as in his power. But he came not. My anxiety grew intolerable; hour after hour passed away, while I reckoned minute after minute, as if they were so much drained from my own existence. Even, if I had been able to move, it was impossible to know where to follow him. His steps might have been watched. Doubtless the conspirators were on the alert to prevent any approach to the palace. He might have fallen by the pistol of some of those men, who had not scrupled to conspire against their monarch. The most miserable of nights at length wore away; but it was only to be succeeded by the most fearful of mornings. The career of Paul was closed! On the entrance of the chamberlains into his sleeping apartment, the unhappy Czar was found dead. There could be no doubt that he had perished by treason. He was strangled. The intelligence no sooner spread through the capital, than it produced a burst of national sorrow. All his errors were forgotten. All his good qualities were remembered.

But where was my gallant and excellent friend—Guiscard?—Of him I heard nothing.

Another week of suspense, and he appeared. His history was of the most singular kind. On the night when I had last seen him, he had made his way through all obstacles into the palace, and been promised a private interview with the Czar. But, while he urged that no time should be lost, he had sufficient proof that there could be no chance of an interview. A succession of apologies was made: the 'Czar was at supper'—'he was engaged with the minister'—'he had gone to rest.' In total hopelessness of communicating his pressing intelligence in person, he at length consented to seal the roll, and place it in the hands of one of the officers of rank in the household. But that officer himself was in the conspiracy. The paper was immediately destroyed; and the bearer of it was considered to be too dangerous to be sent back. He was put under arrest in an apartment of the palace, and told that his life depended on his silence. He urged his diplomatic character in vain. The only answer was the sword of the conspirator turned to his throat. But within the week the revolution was complete, and he was set at liberty. A new monarch, a new government, a new feeling followed this dangerous act. But the character of the young monarch was made to be popular; the reign of caprice was at an end. The empire felt relieved; and Russia began the most glorious period of her national history.

My mission was now accomplished, for I refused to hold the embassy under a rival cabinet; but I carried with me from St Petersburg two trophies:—the former was the treaty concluded by Paul with France for the march of an army, in conjunction with a French column of 300,000 men, to invade India—a document which had hitherto baffled all diplomatic research; the other was the pathetic and noble letter of Alexander to the British sovereign, proposing a restoration of the national friendship.

I took my leave of the Russian court with a most gracious audience of its new monarch. I saw him long afterwards, under different circumstances, struggling with a tremendous war, pressed by every difficulty which could beset the throne, and throwing the last melancholy and doubtful cast for the independence of Europe. But, both now and then, I saw him, what nature had made him—a noble being. His stature was tall and commanding; and he was one of the most striking figures of his court when in the uniform of his guards. But his manner was still superior—it was at once affable and dignified; he spoke of European interests with intelligence, of his own intentions with candour, and of England with a rational respect for its spirit and institutions. Of his own country, he expressed himself with candour. "I feel," said he, "that I have a great trust laid on me, and I am determined to fulfil it. I shall not make the throne a bed of roses. There is still much to be done, and I shall do what I can. I have the advantage of a fine material in the people. No being is at once more susceptible of improvement, and more grateful for it, than the Russian. He has quick faculties and an honest heart. If the common hazards of empire should come, I know that he will not desert me. In the last extremity of human fortunes, I shall not desert him."

Those generous declarations were gallantly realized on both sides within a few years. I was not then aware that the Imperial prediction would be soon brought to the test. But it was gloriously fulfilled at Moscow, and proudly registered in the fragments of the throne of Napoleon.

Impatient as I was to reach England, I left St Petersburg with regret. Clotilde left it with those feelings which belong to the finer fancy of woman. She remembered it as the scene where she had enjoyed the most dazzling portion of her life; where every countenance had met her with smiles, and every tongue was prodigal of praise; where the day rose on the promise of new enjoyments, and the night descended in royal festivity. As we drove along the banks of the Neva, she more than once stopped the carriage, to give herself a parting glance at the long vista of stately buildings, which she was then to look upon, perhaps, for the last time. The scene was certainly of the most striking order; for we had commenced our journey on the evening of one of the national festivals; and we thus had the whole population, in all their holiday dresses, to give animation to the general aspect of the massive and gigantic architecture. The Neva was covered with barges of the most graceful form; the fronts of the citizens' houses were hung with decorations; music sounded from a vast orchestra in front of the palace; and the air re-echoed with the voices of thousands and tens of thousands, all evidently determined to be happy for the time. We both gazed in silence and admiration. The carriage had accidentally drawn up in view of the little hut which is preserved in the Neva as the dwelling of Peter. I saw a tear glistening on the long eyelash of my lovely fellow traveller.

"If I wanted a proof," said she, "of the intellectual greatness of man, I should find it in this spot. I may see in that hut the emblem of his mind. That a Russian, two centuries ago—almost before the name of Russia was known in Europe—while its court had scarcely emerged from the feuds of barbarous factions, and its throne had been but just rescued from the hands of the Tartar—should have conceived the design of such an empire, and should have crowned his design with such a capital, is to me the most memorable effort of a ruling mind, within all human recollection."

"Clotilde, I was not aware that you were inclined to give the great Czar so tender a tribute," I said laughingly, at her embarrassment in the discovery of a tear stealing down her cheek.

Truth was in her reply. "I agree in the common censure of the darker portions of his course. But I can now judge of him only by what I see. Who is to know the truth of his private history? What can be more unsafe than to judge of the secret actions of princes, from the interested or ignorant narratives of a giddy court, or foreign enemies? But the evidence round us allows of no deception. These piles of marble are unanswerable;—these are the vindications of kings. The man who, sitting in that hut, in the midst of the howling wilderness, imagined the existence of such a city rising round him and his line—at once bringing his country into contact with Europe, and erecting a monument of national greatness, to which Europe itself, in its thousand years of progress, has no equal—must have had a nature made for the highest tasks of human advancement. Of all the panegyrics of an Imperial life, St Petersburg is the most Imperial."

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We passed rapidly through the Russian provinces, and, intending to embark in one of our frigates cruising the Baltic, felt all the delight of having at length left the damp and dreary forests of Livonia far down in the horizon, and again feeling the breezes blowing from that ocean which the Englishman instinctively regards as a portion of his home. But, as we drove along the smooth sands which line so many leagues of the Baltic, and enjoyed with the full sense of novelty the various contrast of sea and shore, we were startled by the roar of guns from the ramparts of Riga, followed by the peal of bells. What victory, what defeat, what great event, did those announce? The intelligence at length broke on us at the gates; and it was well worth all our interest. "Peace with France." The English ambassador had arrived in Paris. "War was at end, and the world was to be at rest once more." I changed my route immediately, and flew on the road to Paris.

My life was destined to be a succession of scenes. It had been thrown into a whirl of memorable incidents, any one of which would have served for the tumult of fifty years, and for the meditation of the fifty after. But this was the period of powerful, sometimes of terrible, vicissitudes. All ranks of men were reached by them. Kings and statesmen only felt them first: they penetrated to the peasant; and the Continent underwent a moral convulsion—an outpouring of the general elements of society—like that of some vast inundation, sweeping away the landmarks, and uprooting the produce of the soil; until it subsided, leaving the soil in some places irreparably stripped—in others, filled with a new fertility.

I found France in a state of the highest exultation. The national cry was, "that she had covered herself with glory;" and to earn that cry, probably, no Frenchman who ever existed would hesitate to march to Timbuctoo, or swim across the Atlantic. The name of "conquest" is a spell which no brain, from Calais to Bayonne, has ever thought of resisting. The same spell lives, masters, domineers over the national mind, to this hour; and will last, long after Paris has dropped into the depths of its own catacombs, and its fifteen fortresses are calcined under the cannon of some Austrian or Russian invader. It will be impossible to tell future ages the scene which France then presented to the mind. If objects are capable of record, impressions are beyond the power of the pen. No image can be conveyed to posterity by the sensations which crowded on Europe in the course of the French Revolution—the rapidity, the startling lustre, and the deep despair; as it went forth crushing all that the earth had of solid or sacred. It was now only in its midway. The pause had come; but it was only the pause in the hurricane—the still heavier trial was at hand. Even as a stranger, I could see that it was but a lull. Every thing that met the eye in Paris was a preparative for war. The soldier was every thing, and every where. I looked in vain for the Republican costumes which I so fearfully remembered. They had been flung aside for the uniform of the Imperial Guard; or were to be seen only on a few haggard and desolate men, who came out in the twilight, and sat in silence, and gloomy dreams of revenge, in some suburb cafÉ. Where were the deadly tribunals, with their drunken judges, their half-naked assassins, and the eternal clank of the guillotines?—all vanished; the whole sullen furniture of the Republican drama flung behind the scenes, and the stage filled with the song and the dance—the pageant and the feast—with all France gazing and delighted at the spectacle. But, my still stronger curiosity was fixed on the one man who had been the soul of the transformation. I have before my eye at this moment his slender and spirituel figure; his calm, but most subtle glance; and the incomparable expression of his smile. His face was classic—the ideal of thought; and, when Canova afterwards transferred it to marble, he could not have made it less like flesh and blood. It was intensely pale—pure, profound, Italian.