a man's voice enquired, Quien esta ay? Luego sabras,* was the laconic answer of the guerilla. At the same moment the heavy oaken door gave way under the but-ends of three or four muskets; and, springing from his horse, Martin rushed up the stairs followed by half-a-dozen men. The whole had occurred in far less time than it takes to describe it, and sixty seconds had barely elapsed from the time the word gallop was given to the cavalry, to the moment when Zurbano opened the door of the room where the occupants of the house were assembled. It was a large sitting room, comfortably, almost elegantly furnished in the French style, and presenting the appearance of far more luxury and refinement than would have been inferred from the exterior of the house. An open pianoforte with music and lights placed upon it, some drawings suspended from the walls, a guitar, with a blue riband attached to it, and an embroidery frame, indicated feminine tastes and occupations. On a table in the centre of the room were a lamp, some cards, and a few books.

Grouped together in the recess of an open window, and with faces betokening alarm and anxiety, stood seven persons. An elderly man in plain clothes, but of military appearance, two very young officers in staff uniforms, three beautiful girls, and a lady who, from her mature age and a strong family resemblance, might be their mother, composed the party. These were the Carlist general Ituralde, his wife, son, and daughters, and the lover and affianced husband of one of the girls. The two young men were quartered not far from the residence of Ituralde; and, having obtained a few hours' leave, it was to make the most of their hurried visit that the family had remained till nearly four o'clock in the morning without retiring to rest.

"Mi général," said Zurbano with

mock respect, and preserving perfect gravity of muscle, although a laugh of exultation twinkled in his deep-set restless eyes, that at this moment appeared to flash fire; "mi général,' said he ironically, raising his boina from his head, "when your excellency is at leisure I would venture to request you to accompany me below stairs, as there are persons outside waiting anxiously to see you.'

"Who and what are you?" said Ituralde, " and what means this outrage and intrusion?"

"I am Martin Zurbano, called Barea," was the reply.

At this name, so dreaded by every Carlist, a shriek of horror burst from the females, who crossed themselves as if they had beheld an evil spirit. Even the three men started, and a deep shade of gloom, almost of despair, came over their countenances.

"I am ready to accompany you," said Ituralde after a moment's pause; "but I beseech you, if you have the heart of a man, protect my wife and daughters from outrage.'"

"I do not make war upon women," sternly answered Barea," and these are safe-but for yourself and those two young cubs of rebellion, make your peace with God, for in five minutes you die."

It would be impossible to do justice to the heart-rending scene that fol lowed this abrupt and cruel declaration of the Christino chieftain. The three daughters gave way to the most frantic sorrow, beating their bosoms, tearing their hair, and throwing their arms round their father, brother, and friend, as if to shield them from the clutch of the executioner. The grief of their mother, although perhaps stronger, was more subdued, and of another character. She threw herself on her knees before a crucifix that stood in a small niche of the apartment; and whilst the big tears streamed from her eyes, and an occasional deep and choking sob burst from her

* Who is there? You will soon know.

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NAPOLEON, the genius of war, the incarnation of victory, the instinct of command, could be conquered in one of three ways only. Either that genius, in one of those fits of mad confidence and blind fury to which genius of every kind is peculiarly liable, would dash itself against a rock, and, in unequal combat with the immutable laws of nature, perish; or the irregular revolutionary might, of which Napoleon was the representative, would be encountered by the stronger might of robust military manhood in a people that had learned to be free without license, and bold without blustering; or the brilliant blaze of military glory and national aggrandizement, which was the great inspiration of the French armies, would be met by the strong deep glowing flame of genuine patriotism; and the superficial, as in all cases, would yield to the substantial, the theatrical to the true. None of these three powers singly conquered Napoleon, but all of them together: nature at Moscow, the indignant flame of regenerated nationality at Leipzic, the manhood of a free people at Waterloo. This was the formidable COALITION that conquered Napoleon; a combination of gods and men unprecedented in history. That he should have been invincible, except by such a union of extraordinary forces, is the strongest proof at once of the transcendant might of his genius, and of the important ends which Providence had to realize by the discharge of this terrible electricity.

Mr Carlyle, in his most picturesque History of the French Revolution, stops short at the famous slaughtering of the sections by Barras and Bonaparte in October 1795; and for the purposes of epic art, that whiff of grape-shot certainly was the only proper conclusion. But in a moral and political point of view, that last act of the bloody Parisian drama was, to

borrow the phrase of Talleyrand, only "the beginning of the end;" nay, it is not properly in France, in the Restoration, in the glorious three days, in Louis-Philippe, in the squib dynasty of the "son of the revolution," that we are to seek for the great results or moral conclusion of the French Revolution. Napoleon was a scourge of God for the chastisement of Europe, a Thor's hammer for the breaking of many crazy political cisterns that could hold no water. He came, a visible judgment upon the earth; and the effect of his coming was to beat down the empty insolent, to tear away the purple rags of every mere monarchy of show, to waken the sleeper, to gird the languid with strength, and to call neglected merit from obscurity. Any less comprehensive view of the effects of the French Revolution, or of Napoleon's mission, must always be imperfect and unsatisfactory.

As Christianity came forth from Judaism, and a wise son is often born of a foolish father, so the moral good that Providence brought about by the terrors of hell let loose in France, is not to be sought for in France and within the Revolution, but without and beyond both.

If we will learn to appreciate duly(as, if the study of history shall in any way permanently profit us, we must do)-what the substantial good is that Providence has effected by the agency of Napoleon, we must in the first place, and in the last place, look to GERMANY. Every power, indeed, that took a serious and decided part in the great European contest profited more or less: no man ever fights a battle without feeling himself morally the stronger and the nobler for it. Italy only came out of this long series of conflicts unbenefited, because Italy only did not fight for herself. The four powers that took the greatest share in the struggle, Austria, Prussia,

Russia, England, carried off, as was just, the greatest share of the gains; England materially, indeed, the least, (for a few colonies and barren islands were dearly paid for by the national debt,) but morally the greatest. We approved ourselves before the whole world not merely masters of our own element-the sea-but as the best and most manful of soldiers at Waterloo. This prestige of national reputation, none but a shortsighted fool will undervalue. One well-fought battle is a shield against a thousand insults, a charm to check a thousand brawls: sentimentalists, glib to discourse on the horrors of war and bloodshed, should remember this. But Russia, Prussia, and Austria, gained not materially only to a great extent, but morally in a ratio almost equal to England. Russia at a step became master of Poland, and arbiter, or at least one great arbiter, of Europe. The hand that burned Moscow showed the men of Petersburgh the way to Constantinople. The Cossacks, the hardfaced barbarian wardens of the sandy Tartar marches, were now suddenly civilized-they were admitted into the council of crowned heads and coroneted plenipotentiaries at Vienna-they flattered Metternich, and exchanged many strokes of dexterous tongue-fence with Talleyrand-they signed protocols, and disposed of the fate of nations by a word. This was much. But Germany was not merely advanced and aggrandized by the wars of the Revolution; she not merely rose to a political importance in Europe beyond what Frederick or Joseph had dreamed of-but she was internally regenerated and radically remodelled. The confusio divinitus conservata of the Holy Roman Empire could be preserved no longer a god rather seemed eager to destroy it. The venerable building fell; crumbling, as if eager to be dismissed, into dust at a touch. No man wept over it. There was heard only a small doleful screaming of bats, and owls, and spiders, and loathsome things that had made their abode there for centuries; but the hearts of all true Germans rejoiced at the fall. The ground was now clear. The German people could now walk at large in some respects, not cooped up, as formerly, like so many caged beasts in a menagerie: the name of the German EMPIRE had manifestly

vanished into the limbo of things that have been; the reality of the German NATION might now reasonably be expected to take its place on the living stage of things that are.

The

Such a change, or vista at least of a change, had been effected by the terrible passage of Lodi, and the heroic standard planted on Arcola, (sure pledges of the peace of Campo Formio and the negotiations of Rastadt ;) by Marengo, Hohenlinden, Austerlitz, the peace of Presburg and the Confederation of the Rhine. But matters were yet dim and imperfect. Only the wise and thoughtful of the land could see the hand of Providence working behind all these strange and startling dramas of human ambition. Nay, the worst crisis of the great national disease was yet to come. most fatal prostration was to precede the most glorious elevation. The battle of Jena and seven years' servitude were necessary to regenerate the Prussian people, holding up before them, as it were daily, the visible image of their own shame; while Aspern and Wagram, crowning so many disasters, at length taught Austria that the tenacity even of a rock cannot resist fire; that soul must be opposed to soul; and the national vanity of the united French be made to try its strength fairly against the national pride of the united Germans.

Here, indeed, was the great moral result of the French Revolution, (so far as Germany was concerned,) to make the Germans, in some sense, a NATION; to make them recognise their ancient brotherhood, and know their common interests; to restore, in a better form, the unity of the empire under Barbarossa; and to make them feel practically the great old truth, that union is strength. When Offa, King of Mercia, the famous father of Peter's pence, was honoured with the alliance and friendship of Charlemagne, the German people were united and great, the Anglo-Saxons were divided and small. But Time, in both cases, spelled his own prophecy backwards. When Moreau advanced across the Rhine in 1796, the Suabian states left the Archduke almost before a blow was struck, and hastened to make their separate submission. Ex uno disce omnes. What a Germany was here! Fancy Yorkshire or Devonshire concluding a separate peace

with France-England in this case would be a mere name. Germany was nothing better till 1813. Twenty years of almost unremitted cannonading had been necessary to produce this work; and, as human nature is constituted, it is really difficult to perceive how a less violent pressure from without could have forced the organization of materials containing so many elements of mutual repulsion. It is a hard thing to ask a man, for charity and the love of Christ, to cut off his little finger; no person will deliberately cut off his own head. The immediate princes of the empire could never be expected to mediatize themselves. Instead of hundreds of petty sovereigns, the victories of Napoleon gathered together in Germany, for a season at least, one German people at Leipzic. The gain here was immense; the memory of such a gathering, when once it has taken place, lives for ages with the virtue of a continued reality. What Homer was, as a common symbol to the ancient Greeks, that the war-songs of 1813 are to the modern Germans. But this is not all. The Germans learned not only union from this strife, but also manhood. True, they had never in any part of these protracted wars displayed the feebleness and cowardice of the Italians: but that there was a looseness about them which required to be braced, a dulness which required to be sharpened, a heaviness which required to be spurred, admits of no denial. Above all things, they wanted, what the French and the English had-a SOUL. Austria indeed had, throughout the whole contest, displayed a tenacity of purpose and stability of position truly admirable; but stone dikes also can stand: what Austria had not was fire, enterprise, vigour, the enthusiasm, the heroism, the genius of war.

We may

say literally that, in the Italian campaign for instance, Austria exhibited a merely negative, France a positive manhood in soldiership. Prussia, again in the campaign of 1792 and in the peace of 1795, showed the half policy of timid old age; and in 1805 and 1806 the vacillation and nervelessness of perfect dotage. Here a new creation was called for. "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; for it is better that one member should perish, than that thy whole body

should be cast into hell-fire." This was the manifest, audible voice of God that preached in Prussia's ear, from the Peace of Tilsit to the Congress of Vienna. Prussia followed the Divine warning: faith, as it always does, removed mountains; out of the bitter came forth sweetness; weakness was changed into strength; and one leap brought the Prussian people from the lowest depth of baseness to the proudest pinnacle of heroism. Blücher, we know, was neither a Napoleon nor a Wellington in the field; but if he was not the genius of war, he was certainly the genius of fighting; and with him every common bursch of Halle and Jena was inspired with the heroic devotion of a Lannes, and girt round with the cool intrepidity of a Massena. It was no vain phrase of "fatherlandizing" then, as Fuseli said of Klopstock's odes.

The Emperor of the French could not say of the Germans in 1813, as he did of the Italians in 1797—“ How rare are MEN!"-they were as cheap as cannon balls; every vulgar jäger in a green coat was a hero; a lyre was in every heart, and a sword was in every hand. Blessed, indeed, were they who saw those things!—a public bonfire, as Carlyle in his favourite phrase would say, of all SHAMS, and a general uprising of truth, and strength, and righteousness, in their noblest character. It were well if certain dim desponding candle-wasters, calling themselves philosophers, would, among their multitudinous speculations, inspect these things a little more minutely: let no man cast off faith in his kind. There is, by the grace of God, an instinct of good in human nature, that will finally burst the clogs and bandages of hereditary baseness, and drive the devil and all his works into perdition, as certainly as life is stronger than death, and light more positive than darkness. What has been done once may be done again. After Martin Luther and the Liberation war, he is a poor pitiful phraser who despairs of Germany.

After the peace, there necessarily was a great sinking in the hopes of some whose patriotic aspirings were more lofty than intelligible, a cooling down of much wild fervour, and a puffing away of many dreams. On the other hand, the policy of the Ger