which he demolished, and for the materials of which he obtained four-teen times the purchase money, and was enabled by it to buy a part of, the park. All the timber and all the wood was (were) immediately cut down and sold, which again more than doubled his capital. He then thought it prudent or dignified to change his name with his fortune. Under the appellation of Beaumanoir he came to this capital (Paris), bought an hotel, speculated in the funds, increased his riches, was advanced to the rank of a general, without ever having seen an enemy, and is now a commander of Buonaparte's Legion of Honour. His wife's routs, assemblies, and balls, are now the resort and rendezvous of all fashionable people of both sexes. And what has the great nation gained by this sale of national property, which has ruined a Duke, and enriched a barber? Not the amount of twelve thousand livres, 500l. sterling!”

The author's exclamations on revisiting Paris, after a lapse of thirteen years, are perfectly natural.

"Thirteen years are passed away since I the last time inhabited this guilty city, this focus of corruption, immorality, and crime! the most patriotic of Kings then reigned; or rather rebels used his name to tyrannize; but what atrocious monsters have since succeeded him!

"When I was here in 1791, the revolutionary fame of the despicable La Fayette was eclipsed by the increasing popularity of a vile Petion, of an infamous Brissot, and of their sanguinary and depraved accomplices. Now a man rules unlimited, who then was an obscure individual; and the weight of his iron sceptre, though oppressive and crushing, is endured, if not with content and satisfaction, at least without resistance. Those who then exclaimed, with hypocritical enthusiasm, liberty! equality! fraternity or death! live now the quiet and abject slaves of an Usurper, who owns no superior, who suffers no equal; who has trampled upon the rights of man, invaded the Sovereignty of his Prince, and annihilated the Sovereignty of the people; who, unrelentingly, tyrannizes over the French nation, and oppresses and treats all other states like France."

;

And it is for this that ancient institutions have been overturned that all property has been destroyed; that law has been annihilated; that murder has been consecrated; and that so many millions of money have been squandered, and so many millions of lives sacrificed!!!-If the evil were limited to France, we could alinost wish that Napoleone Buonaparte might long live to govern the French, as the only punishment adequate to their crimes.

Fatalism, we are told, has become the fashionable religion of the Parisians and of the armies; and as these two classes give the ton to the whole Empire, no doubt the great majority of the French are fatalists. It is certainly the most comfortable kind of persuasion for a people who treat the commands of their God with supreme contempt, and are determined to gratify their passions without restraint, and, in short, to live as they please.

"But this spirit of fatality also diminishes industry, flatters idleness, and excites a neglect of every thing that does not produce an immediate

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enjoyment. It increases the passion of gambling (of which government takes advantage to a shameful degree), and augments the number of wretches, who, after being disappointed, become desperate, and destroy others or themselves. In a few words, its fatal effects are felt ad infinitum, already among all classes of society, and must be still more felt in generations to come. Many true patriots and devout Christians hoped that the presence of the Roman Pontiff would put a stop to its progress, and impede its ravages; but from what I have heard of the public opinion, Pius VII. by his submission to Buonaparte, and by suffering himself to be an instrument of his ambition, if not, as many say here, an accomplice of his guilt, has 'more scandalized faith, than converted infidelity."

We always maintained that this wretched Pontiff had done more to degrade and to discredit the religion which he professes, than all his predecessors had done for some centuries. To become the minion of an assassin, blasphemously to hail as his beloved Son in Jesus Christ a monster of iniquity, a man drenched in human blood, a wretch stained with every crime, who had publicly renounced his Redeemer, and most impiously proclaimed his triumph over the Cross, is such a degradation of character, such a display of baseness and infamy, as no words are sufficiently strong to characterize. And yet this is the Pontiff whom the infatuated Romanists of Ireland are taught to venerate, to idolize, and almost to deify;-they regard him as infallible, and are, we have reason to fear, but too well prepared to pay implicit obedience to his commands, be they what they may; and what they will be, under the dictation of Buonaparte, it requires no gift of prescience to divine. Let our rulers look to this, and then, if they dare, or, rather, if their consciences will let them, issue their mandates to their dependents, not to defend the established religion of the realm, by exposing the dangerous tenets of the Romish Church. Heaven forbid, we should be ever reduced to the cruel necessity of enforcing a second reformation, or a second revolution; if experience have not taught us wisdom, we ought to perish for our folly. We descry great, very great danger, in the present times, and it behoves all loyal subjects and faithful Protestants, not only to be vigilant, but to speak plain truth; careless whom it may offend. The principles which placed the House of Brunswick on the throne are those which we profess, and around which every true friend of his country must rally, at this momentous crisis, prepared not only to defend them with firmness and resolution, but to proclaim to the world his determination so to do.

Our Traveller declares that he had a long conversation with Portalis, who is the minister of the Christian worship, a new office created for him by the infidel tyrant his master, on the subject of this universal prevalence of fatalism, and on the subject of the Pope's journey to Paris. Portalis told him that he had foreseen the danger of it, and had dissuaded Buonaparte from insisting on it; but that Talleyrand, who wished to degrade the religion which he hates, pressed it so strongly,

strongly, that all his arguments failed. The following extract from a letter written by this Portalis, to a confidential adviser of Louis XVIII. and dated Paris, August 2, 1797, is curious.

"The public spirit is now all over France, such as I wish it. The return of the Bourbons, and the restoration to his Throne of the august Chief of that illustrious House, to which France is indebted for all her. grandeur and posterity for ages, is the common talk, wish, and order of、 the day here, as well as in the departments. Some few culpable and obscure Jacobins speak, indeed, still of liberty and equality, but their noise would be totally insignificant, and not heard, had they not selected for their chief and protector, the fortunate general of the army of Italy (Buonaparte); but measures have been taken by the leading friends of Monarchy, to remove this foreigner both from his command and from France. Present my most humble and dutiful homage to my beloved King, and assure His Majesty of my invariable devotion and fidelity to my last breath."

This invariable devotion and fidelity have been finely illustrated by the all giance which Mr. Portalis has sworn to the Usurper of that Monarch's Throne, and the murderer of his family. The son of Portalis was Secretary of Legation in this Country, during the Addingtonian truce, and is now Minister at Ratisbon. An anecdote is here told of one of Buonaparte's senators, Lanjuinais, which, if true, redounds very much to his credit, as it proves him to be a consistent character, and a republican in principle, which can be said of very few indeed of the pretended patriots of France.

"When he, in 1799, accepted from Buonaparte his present place of a senator, it is certain that he was promised the continuance, and organization, of a Republic, having for basis, liberty, equality, and popular representations; but in 1802, when it was question (there was a question) about a Consulate for life,, and he obtained an audience of Buonaparte, to dissuade him from such an act, and to cause him to remember his former professions; he was answered, that the mass of the people inclined to, and desired, monarchical forms and institutions.'-' Then be just,' replied Lanjuinais, recall Louis XVIII.; and, if a throne is again to degrade France, it belongs to him and nobody else.'”

This certainly was the language of an honest man, and therefore "Buonaparte has never since addressed to him a word." A very different character is presented in the person of Mr. Fouché, an apostate Monk, and Buonaparte's bosom friend, and Minister of Police.Some years ago, when on his way to Lyons, this devil in human shape, stopped at Sens, where he gave a feast to his brother Jacobins in the town. At this feast he cut into pieces the hearts of the Dauphin and Dauphiness, of France, the illustrious parents of Louis XVI., which had been preserved in the Cathedral, and which he had taken from thence and ordered to be roasted for the occasion, and distributed to his cannibal guests. In swallowing his portion, the miscreant exclaimed,

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claimed, "Oh! could I but at the same time devour all Emperors, Kings, and Princes, I should make a repast to be envied even by the Gods!"

At Chalons our Traveller met with a Banker, who had been a furious patriot at the beginning of the French Revolution, but whom ruin and imprisonment had restored to his senses. Adverting to his former mania, he observed, "When I now hear any one speak of liberty, I always put my hands in my pockets; when of equality, I tremble as in the presence of an assassin; and when of fraternity, run away as fast as I can, for fear of being stabbed and pillaged." This must be allowed to be very rational conduct.

We had marked several passages in the fourth volume of these Travels for notice and comment, but we have already extended our observations so far, that we must bring this article to a close. Passing then, over various anecdotes of low-born upstarts, and profligate thieves, branded by the executioner, whom Buonaparte has raised to places of trust and power; and among others, of the Usurper's beloved uncle, the Cardinal Fesch, who, we are told, formerly kept, first a tavern, and afterwards different brothels, we shall come to the result of the Traveller's general observations on the state of religion and politics in France, or rather on the feelings of the people on those important subjects. Speaking of Lyons, a city, the population of which has been reduced, by revolutionary horrors, from one hundred and seventyve thousand souls, to one hundred and twenty thousand, he remarks:

"As to religion in this city, it is, as every where else in France; the people want a Supreme Being, a God to whom they can contide their sor. rows and griefs, and to whom they can address their prayers for relief, and from whom they can hope for succours. But their worship is merely external mummery; their Christianity under Buonaparte is the same as their atheism under Robespierre, and their infidelity under the Directory; it is the mere fashion of the day. Were the fortune of Buonaparte to continue some years longer, he might with the same ease drive French, men into mosques, as he now drums them into churches; and they would there, with the same sincerity, prostrate themselves before Mahomet, as they at present kneel before the crucifix.

"The clergy in this part of France (the South), as well as in the northern departments, are divided by an unfortunate schism; the churches of the constitutional priests are deserted, while every Sunday, or holiday, the non-juring priests are forced by the faithful to celebrate often in open fields the mysteries of the Roman Catholic religion. Their audience is always very numerous, and though they have no salaries, they are better supported than their opponents. Acts of cruelty and of violence have been exercised to cause this religious scandal to cease, and to produce a desir able union in the church, but all in vain; and the people have preferred not to go to church at all, rather than to attend the mass of (said by) priests whom they considered as perjured apostates.

"At Ciotat the gens d'armes seized last year, by the order of govern ment, a non-juring priest, while officiating in a field, but the people re

leased,

leased him, and killed three of the gens d'armes, He was, however, taken up again secretly, and ordered to be transported. On the following Sunday the constitutional priest was assailed and dispatched before the altar, and for a month the opposite sectaries almost every day occasioned confusion and alarm, and numbers of persons perished, until Government thought it prudent to permit the non-juring clergyman to return and to officiate undisturbed,

"In many parishes in the south of France, the Pope has been burnt in effigy with a Jacobin cap on his head; and every where his bulls have been torn to pieces. He is considered to be as much under the power of the devil, as under that of Buonaparte, and a caricature is hawked about among the country people, representing him fraternizing between Napo leone and Belzebub. Under their figures are written these words:And these three make but one person.” (This allusion to the Trinity is impious), In another caricature an angel is seen seizing his tiara from his head, the instant he is placing an imperial diadem on the head of Buonaparte.

"From what I have heard and seen, during my present journey, I am more than ever convinced that the Ecrasons l'Infame,' of Voltaire, has never ceased to be the order of the day among his sectaries; and that Christianity in France approaches every day nearer to its extinction. Buonaparte and Talleyrand are too politic to knock on the head, at once, a religion of eighteen centuries. But the degradation of Christianity, in the person of its ostensible chief, has produced the same revolution in re ligious sentiments, as the humiliation and murder of the head of the kingdom of France, had already done in political ones; and most Frenchmen are therefore religious, as well as political, freethinkers. But, if I am not misinformed, Talleyrand said, even when the Pope still fraternized with Buonaparte in the Thuilleries, Christianity in France will descend into the tomb, without giving either alarm, or making any noise, because the present generation of the French clergy will leave no posterity behind them. Their faith is buried with them, and no resurrection of either is to be apprehended by the friends of philosophy.' Indeed when one remembers that all the present French priests must be now either old, or above the middle age, as since 1790 hardly any young Frenchmen have entered into orders, it is not improbable that within twenty or thirty years, the present altars of Christ here will be deserted for want of servants to officiate."

These facts and reflections we consign to the judgment of our readers, observing however, that the last fact mentioned, is a very striking one, and one which never occurred to us. What a strange

spectacle will it be, to see an immense empire without a minister of religion. But it is to be hoped that the goodness of Providence will interpose, and, by cutting off the infidel barbarians who thus labour to eradicate all religious principle from the minds of the millions who are, for a time, subject to their dominion, prevent such a horrible disgrace to the Christian world.

The political feelings of the French, as they appeared, at least, to our Traveller, may be collected from the following observations:

"The