tion were Genoa and Ragusa. Both had been independent republics, and both under the new arrangements were incorporated into the dominions of neighbouring potentates. Genoa really had some cause of complaint. Lord William Bentinck, whose vigorous sense and high ability were occasionally marred by a tendency to sentimental politics, had been imprudent enough to promise the Genoese that their ancient form of government should be revived. He acted in entire opposition to his orders, which he either misconstrued or despised. Lord Castlereagh had no inclination to revive these petty sovereignties in the neighbourhood of France. Experience had proved that they were dead relics of a bygone state of things, and that in the existing condition of military science they were incapable of self-defence, and only a temptation to aggressive neighbours. The subsequent fate of Cracow has justified the conclusions which he formed. But the Genoese did not take this view of the matter. They hated the Piedmontese with all the hatred that national neighbourhood seems peculiarly calculated to inspire. Moreover, there were motives of a less ignoble cast to prejudice them against the change. Genoa had a splendid history to look back upon, and its inhabitants were naturally unwilling that theirs should be the generation that should bring that history to a close. For themselves influential citizens could not look without dismay upon the destruction of all municipal ambitions which would be dealt by the conversion of Genoa into a mere seaport of Turin. All these feelings combined to make the Genoese passionately anxious to recover their lost independence. They sent in a vehement protest to the Congress of Vienna, and even went so far as formally to entrust their papers to Mr. Whitbread, that he might fight their battle in the House of Commons. Here, if anywhere, one would have thought, was a strong national sentiment which would make Genoa a thorn in the side of Piedmont so long as the ill-assorted union should continue. But all this wrath and fury has passed away like a summer shower. Lord Castlereagh was firm, and the annexation was carried through. The union has increased the prosperity of the Genoese to a point which, if they had remained independent, they never could have reached; and, by giving strength to Piedmont, it has laid the foundation on which the genius of Cavour has been able to build a glorious structure. Prussian Saxony and Rhenish Prussia are cases of the same kind. In disposing of them, their ancient state was absolutely disregarded. They were both applied, without the slightest reference to their former sovereigns, to the object of strengthening Prussia by the addition of provinces nationally allied and geographically important. In the execution of this transfer the right of conquest alone was relied upon, and no account was taken of the wishes of the populations. To them the change at the time was profoundly distasteful. In Saxony the influential portion of the community were keenly sensitive to the loss of importance which a small State suffers when it is merged into a greater; and in the new Rhenish acquisitions the people had in addition to regret the loss of many undoubted improvements which the French had introduced. A long time passed away before the discontent was pacified and the new popula tions became Prussian in heart. In 1820 Mr. Lamb writes to his Government that, owing to the misgovernment of Berlin, their feelings were as hostile as ever. Even in 1838, when the affair of the Archbishop of Cologne was pending, Varnhagen doubted whether the precedent of Belgium would not be followed on the Rhine, and the Prussian connection be violently shaken off. But in course of years, habit and mild government have done their work. The grievances of the new Prussian provinces have gone the way of the grievances of Genoa and Norway, They pointed many an eloquent outburst in their time, and now that they have played their part they are consigned to the limbo where forgotten party cries repose. It it clear, therefore, that if Lord Castlereagh and his colleagues at Vienna had taken the advice of their contemporary critics, they would not have consulted the ultimate wishes of the populations with whom they were dealing. They would have abandoned great political objects for the sake of deferring to a national sentiment, which in spite of its seeming earnestness was only a passing whim. Whatever they had done, they could not have produced greater contentment in these various countries than that which prevails at present; but if they had done as they were bidden by their opponents at the time, they would have produced it at the gratuitous cost of sacrificing the strategic advantages which, as matters stand, they have secured. As against the accusers who lived at the same time and enjoyed the same means of judging as themselves, their historical justification has been complete. On the other hand, unless they had possessed the gift of prophecy, it would have been impossible for them to have anticipated the charges of more recent critics. Upon the points where their structure ultimately gave way, not a symptom of weak ness was then to be seen. There was not a cloud to indicate danger in those quarters of the horizon from which the storm that should try it so severely was to arise. Hungarian insurrections, Turkish wars, Italian revolutions, were causes of disturbance which it never at that time occurred to statesmen to the government of Munich for that of Vienna form one of the most striking chapters of the revolutionary war. Lord Burghersh, in his report to Lord Castlereagh, gives a very emguard against or patriots to predict. The phatic testimony to the existence of a similar Turks were not even mentioned at the Con- feeling of intense devotion among the popugress of Vienna. The ambition of Russia to lation of Breisgau-what is now the southern push her frontier westward very nearly broke part of Baden-towards their ancient master, up the Congress in confusion; and her pre- And in Belgium the feeling was so strong, parations for extending it towards India were that it was with great difficulty that the sufficiently active to cause considerable ap- people were induced to renounce the hope prehension to English diplomatists. But in that Austria would again undertake to govern 1815 the decay of Turkey did not seem im- them. They had no desire to be united to minent; and no one could have guessed that any of their neighbours. They hated the from her weakness could have proceeded the French, abominated the Prussians, and had first fatal blow against the European system no great admiration for the Dutch. All that which the Congress were building up. The they desired was to return under the shadow loyalty of Hungary was so unimpeachable of that sceptre which our generation has that the Hungarian regiments were noted by been accustomed to regard as the embodiEnglish envoys as the most anti-democratic ment of all that is feeble, and incompetent, in the Austrian army. Even in Italy, at the and tyrannical. It is too true that a change time the Congress was sitting, there was no soon came over this affectionate relation betrace of the discontent which a few years tween the crown of Austria and its subjects. afterwards became so menacing. The idea of The Viennese Government had learnt the art Italian unity might have germinated in a few of harsh and oppressive administration from poetical minds; but it would have been pass- its revolutionary conquerors, and as soon as ed by as a student's dream if there had been the peace gave it leisure it put the lesson no misgovernment to warm it into life. The into practice. Scarcely was the House of wishes of the various populations were bent on Hapsburg re-established in its former granobjects little reconcilable with the idea of Ita- deur than it entered upon that steady career lian unity. Genoa, as we have seen, longed of misgovernment which it has pursued with only for an independent existence of its own. so much perseverance up to the present day. Mr. Cooke, a gentleman of great experience The Austrian name became odious in Italy and sagacity, who was himself of opinion and the Tyrol within a very few years of the that an ecclesiastico-civil potentate is a peace of 1815; and now, after many years monster,' reported, nevertheless, to Lord of vain conflict with disaffection, the dynasty Castlereagh in 1815, that the Romans in has so completely forfeited its ancient characgeneral were attached to the ecclesiastical ter, that probably a large majority of its subgovernment; and that Murat's proclama-jects would hail its overthrow with joy. tions for the independence of Italy, and his invitations to the Italians to enlist under his banners, were treated hitherto with ridicule.' In the same year the Foreign Secretary is informed by another of his correspondents that 'the Tuscans are much attached to their sovereign the Archduke.' Sicily notoriously dreaded nothing so much as an administrative union with Naples. Milan was infested by secret societies, but the mass of the people forced the Senate to declare against the Viceroy, who was keeping out the Austrians; and Lombardy, as a whole, only petitioned for the modest favour of being governed by a resident Archduke instead of direct from Vienna. Nor was there any ground for believing that the rule of Austria would be oppressive. Her system of government before the revolutionary war had been so successful, that those who had lived under it looked back to it with genuine affection, and longed to resume their allegiance. The devoted efforts which the Tyrolese made to exchange It is absurd, therefore, to speak as if the events of the last two or three years were a condemnation of the policy supported by Lord Castlereagh at Vienna. As the facts lay then before his eyes, there was not the slightest probability that the arrangements the Congress were making in Italy would ever disturb the peace of Europe. There was no general discontent with the ancient dynasties, and nothing in the traditional character of Austrian Government to create that discontent where it had not existed before. Least of all was it probable that any movement in Italy would take the direction of Italian unity. The common tendency of mankind is not towards union, but secession. The promptings of neighbourly jealousy find a much readier ear than the dull suggestions of statesmanlike policy, and in Italy these jealousies have always raged with peculiar violence. Lord Castlereagh would have been mad if he had acted on the supposition that the union of all Italian States into a single nation would ever become the object of Ita- | too; and that the claim to practical common lian aspirations. The creation of a United Italy, had it been possible, would have been in the genius of Lord Castlereagh's policy. He would have valued it, as we value it now, for the strength it would have afforded to the European equilibrium, and the bulwark it would have opposed to France. It effects the very object for which he laboured to build up the kingdoms of Sardinia and the Netherlands, and for which, under the inspiration of Mr. Pitt, he invited Prussia to the left bank of the Rhine. But even if he had had the power, he was too wise to have attempted to manufacture empires on such a scale. He knew that to compress into an artificial unity the various races of the Italian Peninsula, who had not then learned to wish for it, nor unlearned their ancient feuds, was beyond the power of a European guaran tee. The true nature of the policy which guided Lord Castlereagh during his whole career has been singularly misconceived, not only by his antagonists, but by his friends. The character of his mind was so different from that of most of the statesmen amongst whom he lived, or by whom he has been succeeded, that he could hardly fail to be misjudged. He was that rare phenomenon-a practical man of the highest order, who yet did not by that fact forfeit his title to be considered a man of genius. In men of genius, as a rule, the imagination or the passions are too strongly developed to suffer them to reach the highest standard of practical statesmanship. They follow some poetical ideal, they are under the spell of some fascinating chapter of past history, they are the slaves of some talismanic phrase which their generation has taken up, or they have made to themselves a system to which all men and all circumstances must be bent. Something there almost always is that beguiles them away from the plain, prosaic, business-like view of the concerns of this prosaic world, Consequently the mass of mankind, who have a dull, but surefooted instinct of their own interest, feel an uncomfortable misgiving when they see a genius at the head of their affairs. They are aware that first-rate brilliancy cannot be had without something of distortion; but it is no consolation to them that the illusions which are luring him on to ruin lend in the mean time an exquisite charm to the eloquence by which he induces them to accompany him on the road. On the other hand, the clever world is very intolerant of plain, practical statesmen. It maintains, sometimes with very good reason, that where the imagination is stunted, it is merely because the whole mind is stunted sense is often only a euphemism for a narrow intelligence straitened by an abject regard for precedents and for routine. As a rule, both sides are right in the suspicions they entertain. It is rare to meet with a fervid imagination which is drilled to reserve its flights for efforts of oratory, and to give place entirely to more sober faculties in council. It is still rarer to see an absolutely unimaginative mind possessed of the energy and of the breadth of view indispensable in the statesman of a troubled period. Both kinds of excellence produce great and successful rulers, where they occur; and both are apt to meet, in those around them, with incredulity that such combinations of opposite qualities can exist. Lord Castlereagh was a good instance of the second kind. His mind was energetic and original, without suffering in the slightest. degree from any bias of sentiment. He commanded a far broader view than most statesmen of his time; and he contemplated it through a mental atmosphere untinted by the faintest imaginative hue. This intellectual composition was of great service to him at many a council-board in Europe, and conferred a great benefits on those over whose interests he watched. But it caused him to be constantly misunderstood, both by his contemporaries and by posterity. The clever men of the day could not be brought to believe that a mind so powerful, so clear-sighted, so resourceful, dwelt in a passionless, colourless atmosphere, in which their own talents would have been frozen up. They could not conceive that one man could combine Canning's eagle glance and intellectual grasp, with a languor of emotion and a freedom from enthusiasm that Mr. George Rose himself might have envied. At first they were inclined to explain away the phenomenon by assuming his oratory to be the measure of his mind, and denying him the ability which his speeches were undoubtedly calculated to conceal. The events of 18131815 set this theory at rest. Foiled in this direction, his critics betook themselves to the remaining alternative for an explanation. Under his passionless exterior they pretended to detect a deadly zeal against the liberties of mankind. They believed his foreign policy to be actuated by no other aim but to crush the freedom which he was reluctantly compelled to tolerate at home. And in this hateful crusade the Holy Alliance, of whom he always spoke in Parliament with such respect, were in reality his sworn comrades and ready instruments. This view of his policy extended itself from his opponents to his friends. They, of course, did not give it such bad names; but they were not less wide of the mark in the tendency they assigned to | speeches he would have done readier homage it. They extolled him as the champion of to the Liberal catch-words of the day. If he legitimacy, the bulwark of monarchy, the in- had only constructed a few brilliant periods carnation of that resistance to revolutionary about nationality or freedom, or given a little principles which had become a religious faith wordy sympathy to Greece, or Naples, or among the majority of the educated classes Spain, or the South American republics, the of that day. But whether people blamed it, world would have heard much less of the horor whether they admired it, there was a rors of his policy. pretty general agreement that resistance to popular claims was the final cause of his political existence. But in respect to most of these questions he was a perfect heretic. Whether he approved of the doctrine of nationality or not, it is dif So far as this view of his policy on the one ficult to say, for he never seems to have side or the other implied that he was ani-realized its existence. It had not made great mated by any hostility to freedom, it was un- way in the world before his death, and was doubtedly unjust. But it was not unjust in principally confined to the Carbonari in Italy the sense of being an exaggeration. It was and the Illuminati in Germany. The idea an entire misconception of the character, and, therefore scarcely seems to have dawned upon so to speak, of the temperature of the man's him that any one had laid it down as a polimind. It was pitched on a key-note far tical dogma, that no two people speaking dif too emotional. It assumed, what in those ferent languages ought to be under the same stirring times was true of most people, an government; and that any amount of revoluenthusiastic nature; whereas enthusiasm was tionary confusion was preferable to such an precisely the ingredient which had been enormity. Not having mastered it, he was omitted in the composition of Lord Castle- unable to draw from it its obvious inference, reagh's character. All the other spurs to that Austria in holding Venetia, Denmark in action he possessed-ambition, sense of holding Schleswig, and Prussia in holding honour, sense of duty, and the dogged attach- Poland, were committing an unpardonable ment to an object once taken up, which is crime against the peoples. If he had been the special characteristic of our race. But more instructed in what has been recently no tinge of that enthusiastic temper which called the new European law, he might have leads men to overhunt a beaten enemy, to been embarrassed at being asked to proffer it drive a good cause to excess, to swear alle- to the sanction of England, who owns, withgiance to a formula, or to pursue an imprac-out any consent of the peoples whatever, ticable ideal, ever threw its shadow upon Lord Castlereagh's serene, impassive intelligence. He had his own notions of what good there was to be done, and what was the best way of doing it; and neither contradiction at home nor coaxing abroad ever moved him a hair's breadth from his own particular point of view. But they were such unpoetical, unromantic notions, that no one could, by any stretch of language, dignify them as a cause. There were plenty of causes about the world at the time, concerning which associations agitated, and young men raved, and poets published spirit-stirring stanzas. But, except as they might influence votes in the House of Commons, these exciting movements did not affect Lord Castlereagh. Some of them he thought pernicious, others impracticable, and of others he thought the benefit, though real, enormously exaggerated; and he never would pretend a sympathy he did not feel. It was this impassibility which worked so badly for his fame. It was an affront and an offence to the literary class, by whom these enthusiasms were chiefly fed, and who on secondary points and for a certain space of time have the power of moulding public opinion at their will. He might have maintained his policy with impunity, if in his more nationalities than she can comfortably count. There is no doubt that to the philological law of nations he was obstinately deaf, whether he perfectly understood it or no; and that if he had understood it better, he would have disliked it more. The poetical or literary law of nations met with quite as little favour at his hands. By his conduct in the Greek question he evidently did not assent to the modern theory, that the territorial limits of a country ought to be settled according to its literary history. He never understood why the fact that Eschylus had written in Attica, and Pindar had celebrated the Games of the Morea, some five-and-twenty centuries ago, furnished in itself any reason for changing the government under which Attica and Morea happened at that moment to be. Possibly he would have been equally impenetrable to the argument, that because Dante was a citizen of Florence, or Virgil composed poetry in Rome, therefore a German ought not to reign in Venice. It never would have occurred to him as a possible theory, that governments should be overturned or treaties broken for the sake of giving a present reality to the traditional glory of some distant past. Some of the grounds of the Italian war he would have appreciated. If we may judge from the protests and warnings | no sort of favour for that kind of freedom that he uttered when the Congress of Trop- which is conferred by universal suffrage, pau were holding their disastrous delibera- and which is flourishing in such fascinating tions, we may be sure that he would have beauty in the State of Maryland 'just now; resisted in 1859 the illegal suzerainty which nor was he ever guilty of the hypocrisy of Austria had acquired over the Italian Courts encouraging abroad that which he repelled as earnestly as he guarded himself against at home. But, on the other hand, he had acquiescing in it in 1820. He would have no sympathy with absolutism. The extrarecognized all the evils of the misgovern- vagant theories of legitimacy entertained by ment, the tendencies to which showed itself some of the more violent spirits of his in the Neapolitan Bourbons even in his time, time received no countenance from him. and which he constantly reprobated. But in While many around him, both Englishmen regard to the question of nationality he would and foreigners, were anxious to give to the have been more unpopular in our day than war of 1813-14 the character of a crusade even in his own. He was not of those who in behalf of legitimacy against revolution, would have raised an insurrection, or gone to he absolutely refused to lend to it such a colour. To his mind the triumph of any particular form of government would have been a poor compensation for assenting to the pernicious doctrine, that foreigners have a right to choose for a nation what its form of government shall be. He refused even to see the Bourbons while there was a chance of peace with Napoleon. The following letter to Lord Liverpool shows how much he dreaded lest the war for European Independence should be mistaken for a counterrevolutionary crusade: war for an idea.' The same positive, practical good sense showed itself in relation to the question of popular rights. It was a mere calumny to call him an enemy to freedom. In its truest and most literal sense-the exemption from oppression he did more for it than any statesman of his age. We have the testimony of the Duke of Wellington that he had done more to destroy the slave-trade than any man in Europe; and the struggle which absorbed the best years of his life was a struggle on a vast scale for the liberties of mankind. The Liberals of the day-and the anomaly has extended itself in some degree to our day also chose to conceive a sentimental tenderness for Napoleon, because he tyrannized by the right of his own sword, instead of by the right of any hereditary claim. But his tyranny was not the less one of the severest and most searching the world has ever seen. The minute exactness with which his war contributions and war conscriptions were levied, invested him with a power of inflicting wide-spread misery which no Roman Emperor ever possessed. Other tyrannies have mainly affected narrow metropolitan areas, or have shown themselves in capricious but occasional acts of cruelty. But from Napoleon's tyranny time gave no respite, and insignificance no escape. His exactions ground down every income, and his massacres, thinly disguised under military names, thinned every village, from Reggio to Lubeck. To have borne a large part in freeing Europe from such a scourge as this-to have provided securities that made it for the future an impossibility was to have done a greater service to the cause of freedom than any shifting of the equilibrium of electoral power is ever likely to effect. But he was not blind to the value of representative institutions in securing freedom from internal injury, though he valued the kernel a great deal more than the husk which protects it. In England he showed 'Upon the whole my impressions are against any step which should, even in appearance, mix our system with that of the Bourbons, whilst we are embarked in discussions for peace, and ignorant how our Allies would relish such a doubt the prudence even of a declaration as to step at the present moment; and in this view I the armistice by sea and land: first, because it would be considered an invitation to a rising; and secondly, because I doubt its efficacy even to that object; as those who reason at all cannot doubt that, were the Bourbons restored, always to recollect that we are suspected of hostilities would immediately cease. We ought having une arrière-pensée on the question of peace, and that we should act with the more caution. 'I have written very hastily my first impressions on your letter. They are intended for Bathurst, for whom I have a letter, as well as lington's letter I think his impressions are the for yourself. From the early part of Lord Wel to such a peace, if Buonaparte will give you But though he was fortunate enough to obtain the high sanction of the Duke of Wellington for his policy, it was almost the only assistance he received. His attitude |