demanded the immediate dismissal of the Austrian Minister, Baron Thugut, and threatened, in case of refusal, to leave Vienna, which he did on the next day. So disgraceful was his conduct regarded, even by the Directory, that this event made but little impression, and no alteration in the continuance of their intercourse with the Austrian Government.

In 1799, he was for some weeks a Minister of the war department, from which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed. When Bonaparte intended to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred thousand livres—calmed him a little, and convinced him that the Jacobins were not infallible or their government the best of all possible governments. In 1801, he was made the commander-in-chief in the Western Department, where he exercised the greatest barbarities against the inhabitants, whom he accused of being still chouans and royalists.

With Augereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plunderer. In the summer, 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and neutral city of Nuremberg to bring him, under pain of military execution, within twenty-four hours, two millions of livres. With much difficulty this sum was collected. The day after he had received it, he insisted upon another sum to the same amount within another twenty-four hours, menacing in case of disobedience to give the city up to a general pillage by his troops. Fortunately, a column of Austrians advanced and delivered them from the execution of his threats. The troops under him were, both in Italy and in Germany, the terror of the inhabitants, and when defeated were, from their pillage and murder, hunted like wild beasts. Bernadotte has by these means within ten years become master of a fortune of ten millions of livres.

Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they are in the wrong. Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution, where the first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him. The many massacres under Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the Court at Venaigin, no doubt display a most sanguinary character. A lady, however, in whose house in La Vendee he was quartered six months, has assured me that, to judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he knows that his crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from stabbing him. Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity as well as justice. Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black Eagle.

LETTER IV.

PARIS, September, 1805.

MY LORD:—Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in his "Life of Louis XIV.," that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the well—distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign countries. According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners. Though the names of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I have never read nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two or three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and scurrilous party pamphlets. I made this observation to Fontanes, who replied that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification; and that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men of greater talents. He granted also that men of true genius and literary eminence were, in England, more careful of the dignity of their character than those of Germany and Italy, and more difficult to be bought over. He added that, as soon as the war ceased, he should cross the Channel on a literary mission, from which he hoped to derive more success than from that which was undertaken three years ago by Fievee.

To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal. Some he has made tribunes, prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a De Crebillon, a D' Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our literature and honours to our nation. This liberality is often carried too far, and thrown away upon worthless subjects, whose very flattery displays absence of taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year—besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for an ode of forty lines on Bonaparte's birthday, an office at Milan, worth twenty thousand livres in the year—and one hundred napoleons d'or for his travelling expenses.

The sums of money distributed yearly by Bonaparte's agents for dedications to him by French and foreign authors, are still greater than those fixed for regular literary pensions. Instead of discouraging these foolish and impertinent contributions, which genius, ingenuity, necessity, or intrusion, lay on his vanity, he rather encourages them. His name is, therefore, found in more dedications published within these last five years than those of all other Sovereign Princes in Europe taken together for the last century. In a man whose name, unfortunately for humanity, must always live in history, it is a childish and unpardonable weakness to pay so profusely for the short and uncertain immortality which some dull or obscure scribbler or poetaster confers on him.

During the last Christmas holidays I dined at Madame Remisatu's, in company with Duroc. The question turned upon literary productions and the comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and foreign authors. "As to the merits or the quality," said Duroc, "I will not take upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally incompetent; but as to their size and quantity I have tolerably good information, and it will not, therefore, be very improper in me to deliver my opinion. I am convinced that the German and Italian authors are more numerous than those of my own country, for the following reasons: I suppose, from what I have witnessed and experienced for some years past, that of every book or publication printed in France, Italy, and Germany, each tenth is dedicated to the Emperor. Now, since last Christmas ninety-six German and seventy-one Italian authors have inscribed their works to His Majesty, and been rewarded for it; while during the same period only sixty-six Frenchmen have presented their offerings to their Sovereign." For my part I think Duroc's conclusion tolerably just.

Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid, recompensed, or encouraged by Bonaparte, none have experienced his munificence more than the Italian Spanicetti and the German Ritterstein. The former presented him a genealogical table in which he proved that the Bonaparte family, before their emigration from Tuscany to Corsica, four hundred years ago, were allied to the most ancient Tuscany families, even to that of the House of Medicis; and as this house has given two queens to the Bourbons when Sovereigns of France, the Bonapartes are,