1830.] 



Domestic and Foreign. 



The bird unsparing feasts away, 



'Midst all the dangers I have sung, 

 She earns her safety and her pay 



Taking the sting from such a tongue. 

 Could I, ye hostile knats make skip, 



("Would pecking at ye ne'er cost me loss) 

 By merely tasting that sweet lip, 



It were brave sport to act Trochilos ! 



Family Library, Vol. VIII. Court and 

 Camp of Buonaparte ; 1829. These 

 sketches of the Court and Camp of Napo- 

 leon are intended to form a kind of supple- 

 ment to the life of Napoleon, which occupied 

 the first two volumes of the Family Library, 

 but not written by the same author, or we 

 should see something like a disposition to 

 present a fair estimate (and here there is 

 none) some desire to shew the good as 

 well as the bad, with respect to men whose 

 characters, every sober person will recollect, 

 have been gathered, in England at least, 

 from the representations it would be cor- 

 rect enough to say, the calumnies of their 

 avowed and deadly enemies. The compiler 

 writes as if we lived in the days of the Pitt 

 and terror system, when an ti -jacobinism was 

 the sole criterion of good citizenship that 

 anti-jacobinism, which, though it be appa- 

 rently as wide from radicalism as the poles 

 asunder, is of the same intolerable tempera- 

 ture, equally adverse to life and liberty, sound 

 sense, and sound morals. Villain and wretch, 

 slave and fool, are ever at his pen's end; and 

 sentiments are hazarded of individuals which 

 nothing short of confidential knowledge 

 could authorize. Speaking of Napoleon's 

 sister, Pauline, he assures us, one would 

 suppose on his personal authority, " Ma- 

 dame (not the Princess) Borghese detests 

 her present husband as much as the first 

 indeed, she could never love the man whom 

 she was required to obey. She is, however, 

 as cordially execrated in return. She occu- 

 pies one wing of his palace at Rome ; the 

 greater part of his time is passed at Flor- 

 ence, and he has caused all communication 

 between the two sides of the palace to be 

 carefully closed, that he may not be cursed 

 with the sight of his wife when he visits the 

 eternal city." After thus favouring us with 

 his confidential communications, he disco- 

 vers, something of the latest, the said prin- 

 cess has been dead four or five years ; and 

 coolly remarks, in an erratum, " some words 

 ought to be altered." 



The Duke de Rovigo, of course, meets 

 with no quarter : and we were surprised to 

 find him allowing, even with this sweeping 

 clause of, " though, of course, far from me- 

 riting implicit credit," " his memoirs will 

 always rank among the necessary materials 

 for the history of Napoleon." Though per- 

 fectly true, this with him is but a transient 

 conviction ; for we perceive he pays not the 

 slightest regard to Savary's very minute, 

 we do not say satisfactory, account of his 

 personal conduct in the miserable affair of 

 the Duke d'Enghein ; but gives his own 



version of the deed, as if Savary had- never 

 written a word. Is there any better reason 

 for crediting Talleyrand than Savaty ? the 

 one, as the writer plainly and profoundly 

 believes, as cunning as a fox, and the other 

 as stupid as an owl; the one capable of any 

 perversion, and skilled in making the worse 

 appear the better reason and the other as 

 incapable of telling his own tale favourably, 

 as of telling it honestly. There were ob- 

 viously greater men concerned in the chief's 

 confidence than Savary then was. 



With regard to Clarke, the Duke of 

 Feltre, though probably a man of no very 

 superior talents, nor very distinguishable for 

 integrity, but not less so, in either respect, 

 apparently, than thousands of another school 

 of politics, of whom the writer would 

 speak admiringly, he is quite intemperate. 

 Clarke was a captain in the French army, 

 so early as 1784, then only nineteen, which 

 proves he was not the very low (in the 

 writer's absurd sense) and despicable person 

 the compiler represents him. In 1792 he 

 was a colonel of cavalry how he rose to 

 this rank is not, he says, very clear that 

 is, of course, according to his hypothesis ; 

 " certainly," he adds, " not by his me- 

 rit," which is plainly quite gratuitously 

 said, and may serve as a specimen of the 

 spirit in which the book is written. It is 

 all alike a mass of libellous scandal if not 

 always false in fact, always perverse in con- 

 struction, and careless of truth. " Clarke's 

 regiment," he continues, " would have been 

 wholly destroyed on more than one occasion, 

 had not his subaltern officers saved it from 

 the consequences of his incapacity." What 

 is the writer's authority for all this ? Ap- 

 parently none of any credit. The reader 

 must ask the same question at every step 

 for the prejudiced and paltry spirit in which 

 the book is written, completely strips the 

 writer of all the consideration and weight 

 due to impartial inquiry and sober and ho- 

 nest judgment. 



In a brief preface, the compiler expresses 

 his belief that his statements will be found 

 in accordance with the very able, interesting, 

 and trustworthy Memoirs of M. de Bou- 

 rienne confessing, in the same breath, that 

 only one volume out of the six had appeared 

 when he began. And as to this Bourienne, 

 Napoleon was not, apparently, very wide of 

 the truth, when, on some occasion, he said, 

 " Bourienne, you are but a simpleton !" 

 and he might have added, looking to his 

 subsequent conduct, something worse. This 

 same Bourienne, whose authority is thus to 

 be taken for every thing, was a double or 

 triple dyed traitor Napoleon's humble 

 friend and private secretary for years then 

 in Louis XVIII.'s service and, again, 

 the day before the emperor's return to Pa- 

 ris, as prefect of police, the author of a pla- 

 card, announcing the arrest, in the garden 

 of the Palais Royal, of two men for ex- 

 claiming, Vive le Roi ! 



In the same preface, the writer alludes to 



