are sufficiently enormous to relieve the bitterest of his foes, did they know how to unite even a moderate share of discretion with their animosity, from the necessity of inventing new ones or insisting upon such as are doubtful. The first and greatest of the number was the employment of the influence he had acquired by his military successes to destroy the liberty of his country. The fortune of France, at least for a length of time, was in his hands. It was in his power to establish her political institutions upon solid foundations, or to build up his own false greatness upon the ruins of every other interest. He chose the latter course, and preferred the part of Cromwell to that of Washington. His second crime, scarcely inferior in magnitude to the first, was the abuse of this ill-gotten greatness to the destruction of the independence and welfare of every foreign nation within his reach. These are

the acts for which his memory will be execrated by the friends of liberty, as long as liberty shall have a friend; and while European courtiers are wasting their sorrows upon the untimely grave of a single unfortunate prince, the wise and good of all countries and ages, with whom a prince is no more than any other man, will only lament his fate in common with that of millions, more unfortunate and more innocent, whose lives and happiness were sacrificed by an individual to the vain phantom of military glory.

One of the great singularities in the every way singular fortunes of this personage, was the lingering constancy with which the affection of the people still hung about him to the last, notwithstanding his early and shameless defection from the cause of freedom, and his subsequent intolerable abuse of power. The friends of liberty throughout the world, especially the less enlightened among them, and those whose opinions are rather the result of impulse than reflection, regarded him, even in the days of his worst excesses, with the sort of distressing interest, which a lover feels for a fair and faithless mistress, who has forfeited his esteem, without having wholly lost her hold upon his affections. A sentiment of this kind was observable in the language of some of the most respectable members of the British parliament; and traces of it might even be perceived in the views of the most decidedly republican portion of our republican community. It was a remarkable thing to see the character and cause of a military despot treated with a sort of indulgence, by so large a part

of a nation, which lives and moves and has its being in the atmosphere of liberty and equality. But here, as elsewhere, men could not wholly separate in their imagination the past from the present; they could not forget at once that Bonaparte, in his earliest and best and happiest days, had been the asserter of the good cause against the Holy Alliance of his time; and that he had trampled upon many a diadem before he stooped to pick up one of them, and disgrace his manly brow with its childish finery. Even after he had assumed the disguise of an emperor, they could not help feeling that he was originally one of themselves; and when they saw him pouring out his fury upon other established governments, from whose abuses they had formerly suffered, they did not realise, in a moment, that his own was infinitely more tyrannical than any that preceded it. The very enormity of his treason against the cause of liberty prevented the people from viewing it, at first, in its true light. It seemed impossible in the nature of things, that the noblest of her champions should have sunk at once, from the loftiest heights of glory to the lowest depth of moral degradation. They could not help flattering themselves, although against the evidence of their senses, that there was some deception in this apparent apostacy, that the general good required that the cause of the people should be entrusted, for a time, to an arbitrary dictator, and that, after beating down all opposition and rooting out every where the last vestiges of ancient abuses, this mighty champion would resign his truncheon of office, return to the ranks from which he had emerged, and pay his vows again at the altar of freedom. Such, or similar to these, were the willing delusions of many true patriots in various countries. They were not wholly dissipated at the time of the fall of Bonaparte; and the compassion naturally inspired by so strange a reverse of fortune, contributed to sustain and even heighten this singular sort of interest: so that it continued to attend him even in his last lonely retreat. Liberty, remembering the ardent zeal and brilliant exploits of her youthful hero, did not disdain to cheer the dark hours of the wretched and fallen apostate from her cause, with a few lingering gleams of affection. Lord Holland, and some other enthusiastic partisans of popular principles, raised their voices in favor of Bonaparte in the British parliament, when every body else had deserted him except his own family and the faithful companions of his

exile: and the care and kindness of these generous souls contributed something to the comfort of his latter years If a heart like his were susceptible of remorse and shame, such treatment would have been far more cutting to him than the persecution of his avowed enemies.

We have been led into these observations in part by the occasional interest now attached to the name and character of Bonaparte, in consequence of his death; an event, the very indifference of which, in a political point of view, makes it more remarkable, than it would have been under any other circumstances. We trust that we have not offended the spirit of Madame de Stael in devoting a few pages to the memory of her great antagonist, since she expresses a hope, in the commencement of her memoirs, that in speaking of herself she shall often be able to withdraw the reader's attention from her own affairs. However unfortunate for her peace may have been her connexion with the history of Bonaparte, we are not sure that it is not one of the circumstances which will contribute most powerfully to maintain her hold upon the attention of posterity. She has indeed expressed this opinion herself, in a letter which she wrote to him upon the occasion of his first order of exile. She observes, You are giving me a sad celebrity—I shall occupy one of the pages in your history.'

ART. IX.-Uebersicht aller bekannten Sprachen und ihrer Dialekte.-A Survey of all the known Languages and their Dialects. By Frederick Adelung, Counsellor of State, &c. &c. &c. 8vo. pp. xiv-186. St Petersburg. 1820.

THIS work has already been briefly noticed in a journal printed in another part of the United States ;* but the importance of the subject, as well as the value of the work itself, would render it inexcusable in us to omit giving some account of its contents, for the information of readers in this quarter of our country. We are the more induced to do this, as we have not yet seen any notice of the work in those English journals, which have the most general circulation among us. The subject of our article will, therefore, have the attraction

The Rev. Mr Schaeffer's German Correspondent, Nos vii and viii.

of novelty, if the reader should find no other inducement to follow us through our remarks upon it; and the present work will have the more importance in the estimation of an American reader, when he is apprised of the simple fact, that more than one third part of all the languages of the globe belong to our continent, in which this learned author enumerates the astonishing number of twelve hundred and fourteen native dialects!

If the present age is to be hereafter celebrated for its extensive and exact researches in those branches of physical knowledge, which had been before studied and in some sort digested into the form of sciences, it will be no less remarkable as the epoch of a new science also-the comparative science of languages. Until the present period, the languages of man have been for the most part studied singly, and merely with a view to an intercourse between nations for commercial or

literary purposes. Just as man, in the early periods of his history, contented himself with studying the properties and phenomena of his native planet, with a view to his immediate necessities, comfort, or pleasure; and did not once think of extending his inquiries even to the other parts of the planetary system, much less to the worlds beyond those worlds. By degrees, however, he dared to venture beyond the narrow bounds of this little globe, and began to observe the other bodies in the system, and to compare their phenomena with those of his own planet; and at length, under the direction of the powerful minds of Newton, La Place, and their illustrious pupils, he has been enabled to unravel their countless irregularities, and arrange them into that wonderful science, which such names alone would be sufficient to immortalize.

In the same manner, since the impulse given by that extraordinary princess, Catharine the Great (for we pass over the original hints which were given by the great Leibnitz, because they lay unheeded till our own times,)-since that impulse, we say, the science of comparative philology has grown up and advanced with no less rapid a pace than even chemistry or any other part of physical science. Man is no longer satisfied with studying the peculiarities of two or three languages of his immediate neighbors, with the limited views we have mentioned; but he now takes a wider range, and studies the phenomena of language (if we may so speak) as he investigates the phenomena of any other part of his own nature or New Series, No. 9.

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