has endeavoured therefore to render the fancy and imagery so predominant, with touches of the human affections here and there, that even those who might wish to meet with no politics at all, may not be unwilling to encounter him for the sake of his poetry. In the whole of the more regular part, for instance, the allusion renders the subject little different from a mere tale of enchantment; the commencement of the second scene where the Shepherds describe the mist that suddenly crossed them, may be construed or not, as the reader pleases, into an allusion to Napoleon's arts in blinding his subjects; and the family meeting in the third scene, after the fairy preparations, is entirely of a domestic nature.

In taking for the ground-work of his pro

duction an allusion to the overthrow of that reckless chieftain, and introducing with their laurels the presiding Spirits of the kingdoms arrayed against him, the author must be understood as not intending to confer praise on any idle character that may have been ludicrously flattered into the notion of it's having played the part of a counter-genius. This were to reverse the fable of the frog and the ox with tenfold caricature, and to represent the sturdy animal as absolutely falling down under a sense of the reptile's superiority. Let such of Bona parte's enemies as had other qualities besides force to bring against him, receive their due reputation it is the popular Spirit, after all, that had the main hand in the business; and this is the spirit, of which the national Genii, in the piece before us, are chiefly

the representatives;-but to talk, as a straggling sycophant here and there has done, of certain persons and their overthrow of Napoleon, is to ascribe victory to the trumpeter's tassels, or to find out a predominant connexion between a fop's whisper in London and the sweeping of an army of locusts into the Red Sea. When Archimedes in his closet confounded the Roman armaments, he was at other work than drinking and lying in bed. It is with great loathing the author admits an allusion to these matters into a place like the present; but he does it for the admonition of those, who forgetting that the very feelings which lead him sincerely to admire liberty, must preserve him from their own slavish inconsistencies, might take occasion from the tenour of the following piece to represent his panegyric

as embracing the most unembraceable per

sonages.

As to Napoleon himself, whether he is to be considered as a compounder with the old despotisms, or as a soldier sacrificing every thing to a mischievous activity, or an emulator of what are called the glories of Cæsars and Alexanders, or a re-assertor of the predominance of intellect, with an unlucky forgetfulness of principle, or lastly, as an outrageous species of philosopher, with a good end really in view, but pursuing it by all sorts of bad means,-his actions are only more or less to be abhorred by the free and plaindealing part of society; for there are very few persons, we believe, who think that he was compelled to go on in his violence by

a continual pressure of enemies from without; and at all events, he was not compelled into the viler parts of his policy, he was not compelled into the suppression of all that was free and honest in France, nor into the inconceivable meanness of his first do ings in Spain. As man with man, he may have his excuses of habit, and circumstance, and frailty of nature; as who has not? Indeed, when we have spun out our metaphysical threads, and find what little strength our closest spun webs contain for resting any conclusions as to merit and demerit, who but becomes sensible of the flimsiness of his final judgment, and is willing to regard and be regarded by all his fellow creatures with eyes of charity and humility? But social necessity is apt to reason to more purpose than speculation upon matters of