talent, but with most uncertain fortune, was making head against his enemies, the French army was mustered near Frankfort in the spring of 1759. Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick began the campaign by attacking it at Bergham, but was repulsed by the mareschal de Broglie. The slightest success then filled the French with audacity, and impelled them to advance boldly on the offensive, whilst the least check was apt to precipitate them into a contrary extreme. They now drove the prince of Brunswick before them, and reached once more the banks of the Weser. Minden was taken; and the inhabitants of Hanover began to look forward to fall again into the power of the French. Prince Ferdinand rallied his forces, however, and took post near Minden, putting an isolated column in advance to entice and deceive his enemies. The mareschal de Contades marched, on the 1st of August, to attack this body, placing his cavalry in the centre, and his foot upon the wings. The French attribute to this disposition the loss of the day, their horse being swept away and routed by the batteries which prince Ferdinand had prepared, whilst the infantry, disordered by its defeat, were unable to act with effect, and were driven from the field. The right wing of prince Ferdinand did not advance to complete the victory, as he had ordered. The general blamed lord George Sackville, who commanded it, obliquely censuring him in his dispatches, by observing, that, had the marquess of Granby been in the place of lord George, the battle could not have failed to be much more decisive. The loss of the French was.severe; amongst their colonels slain at the affair of Minden was the marquis de la Fayette, a noble of an ancien. family. He left his marchioness, a lady of the house of Lu signan, pregnant. This posthumous child is the La Fayette of the revolution, and of the present day.

This year proved most unfortunate to the French. Hithertc the English fleets had more insulted than harmed them. They had made frequent descents, at Rochefort, at Saint Maloes and at Cherbourg, causing damage, indeed, and bearing away trophies, but reaping no advantage, whilst it deepened the generous rivalry of the hostile nations into bitter and invete rate hatred. Pitt brought vigor and largeness of ourpose to the British war-councils; and France now saw her fleets: destroyed, and her colonies fall one by one. Admiral Bos cawen fought La Clue near the Straits of Gibraltar, took two men-of-war, and burnt several others. In the same season Hawke engaged, or rather pursued, the Brest fleet under Conflans, who took perilous shelter from his enemy amongst the shoals and rocks of the coast; he run his own vessel aground

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and burned it: few of the French ships escaped the gallant Hawke, who in this day annihilated the remains of the French maritime power. The fate of Canada was about the same time decided in that action when Wolfe fell in the achievement of victory, bequeathing Quebec, and the wide provinces of which it is the capital, to the possession of his country.

Notwithstanding the defeat of Minden, the duke de Broglie was enabled to keep his positions in the countries of Hesse and Cleves. Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick endeavored generously to put forward his nephew, the young hereditary prince. But neither birth nor favor can make a general. The French defeated him near Cassel. The young commander was then sent against the town of Wesel, but here too he was repulsed by the marquis de Castries. It was in this campaign that the chevalier d'Assas, whilst in advance of his regiment, fell alone in an ambuscade. "If you speak a word, you die," cried the enemy, whose success depended upon being yet undiscovered. "To aid! here is the enemy, Auvergne, cried the gallant young officer, calling and warning his regiment, whilst he received his death-shot on the instant for his heroism.

The struggle of the rival nations for superiority in the East Indies was this year decided. Count Lally, the Irish officer to whom the victory of Fontenoy was chiefly owing, had succeeded to the command as well as to the activity and talents of Dupleix. He had worsted and harassed the English, and had even laid siege to Madras. In Coote, who now commanded the British, he found a countryman and a triumphant rival. Lally was worsted in turn, and besieged in Pondicherry, which was taken in the early part of 1761. Lally was a zealous soldier, but an overbearing and despotic governor. His conduct excited powerful enmity. He cared not on whom his censure fell; whether on the ministry, the court, or the very country for which he fought. Accused of causing the loss of Pondicherry, he repaired to Paris and faced his accusers. Committed to the Bastile, pursued by the calumnies of the French India Company, and the populace who joined them, the unfortunate Lally was condemned to lose his head. So much was his ferocious temper dreaded, that a gag was placed in his mouth as he was led to execution. So iniquitous a judgment proves how unfit the parliament was to exercise even judicial functions, much less the legislative authority which it claimed.

The duc de Choiseul in the mean time sought fresh support, and was happy enough to secure it by an alliance with

Spain. The present king of that country was Charles III., formerly known to us as that Don Carlos, to whom Naples was adjudged. Betwixt him and France was concluded the family compact, by which the houses of Bourbon promised mutual aid. It was an unfortunate act for Spain, whose colonies of Cuba and Manilla, with her ships of war and commerce, fell at once into the hands of England. In short, had France or her government been bribed to enrich and afford triumphs to Great Britain, she could scarcely have adopted other measures, or persisted in policy more pernicious. She now lost Guadaloupe and Martinique, every colony almost and foot of earth beyond her continental realm. Even Belleisle on her own coast was captured. When one country had naught left to lose, and the other little to win, the overthrow of Pitt, and the rise of lord Bute's influence, consequent upon the death of George II. and the accession of his grandson, opened the way for peace. It was signed at Paris in February, 1763. France ceded Canada and Cape Breton. The Mississippi was declared to be the boundary betwixt the colonies of the respective nations; New-Orleans, however, on its left bank, adhering to Louisiana. In India, property and territories were restored to their ancient limits; but the French were to send thither no more troops. Guadaloupe and Martinique were restored; Grenada kept by the British, who at the same time appropriated St. Vincent's, Dominica, and Tobago. Senegal was also ceded to them, and Minorca restored. The demolition of the port of Dunkirk was to be completed, and an English commissioner to oversee the execution of this article. Peace could scarcely have been rendered more disgraceful to France, and yet she signed it, so pusillanimous was her government, so exhausted her finances, so spiritless and disorganized were her armies. The nation, proudly susceptible, deeply felt the humiliation. They attributed it not to their own want of courage or talent, or resources, but to the imbecility of their government, and fundamentally to the vice of its constitution. Whatever of loyalty, or of ancient attachment to despotic rule, still lingered in the country, evaporated with the national honor on witnessing this disgraceful treaty. As religion had lost its hold over French minds by the absurd conduct and misrule of its chief, so did royalty. Both fell as much from mismanagement as from the arguments or attacks of enemies. Facts and not words produce ultimate effects, and decide the opinions of the many; and governments, like individuals, gain solidity and general esteem, much more by their achievements and fortunes, than by the pleas of birth right or good intentions.

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Almost simultaneously with this treaty of Pa, that betwixt Austria and Prussia was signed at Hubertburg. Frederick still held the much-contested Silesia. Far more than a million of men had been sacrificed in vain. The frontier betwixt Austria and Prussia remained the same. Maria Theresa had reaped less advantage from the alliance of France than she formerly found in the friendship of England. The glory of the war chiefly remained with Frederick, who, through an unexampled course of victories and reverses, still preserved the character of great. Perhaps the most astonishing reflection is, that the Prussian monarch ruled over not more than four millions of subjects, a population that constitutes but a very secondary state. Yet out of this he raised armies and funds to combat at once France, Germany, Poland, and Russia. Bonaparte effected wonders with ample means; but when reduced to play the forlorn game of Frederick against united Europe, the great French captain fell, the Prussian lived and died a king.

Although lost in the noise and events of foreign war, the under-plot of domestic politics, the struggle betwixt the Jesuits and high-churchmen on the one side, and the parliament, the men of letters and the public voice on the other, was continued with unabated inveteracy. The sovereign interfered from time to time in these disputes, through the influence of La Pompadour, who from her life and station, as well as from her liberality, was opposed to the church party and the dauphin. The clergy were censured, and the prelates exiled. The opposition of the parliament, however, against papal and sacerdotal usurpation, was confounded with that which it offered to taxes and fiscal edicts; and when this latter species of frowardness became troublesome, the court was compelled to punish the magistrates, and give an apparent triumph to the high church. Historians have not sufficiently explained and dwelt upon the general resistance of the magistracy to Louis XV., and which, not confined to the capital, but spread all over France, amounted almost to rebellion. This resistance was most considerable in the pas d'états, or those provinces which had preserved the privilege of holding provincial assemblies or states, for there the parliament could with greater plausibility uphold their principle of representing in their own body the commons, or tiers état. A letter of De Sévigné fully describes what a mere ceremony the assem bly of the states of Britany was in the reign of Louis XIV. Yet now we find them affecting all the rights of a representa tive body; the Breton parliament claiming the same rights during the recess of the state. Languedoc was equally bold,

equally froward. In short, there was a near approach made to a federal system in France during the latter years of Louis XV.

This menaced encroachment of the parliaments upon the sovereign power was interrupted, in the first place, by the minister Choiseul, who took the part of the legists, and who adroitly made them desist from such pretensions by allowing them a complete triumph over their immediate enemics, the clergy. The duc de Choiseul was an exception to the long succession of ministerial mediocrity. Extremely ugly, his conversation and address soon removed the disagreeable impression made by his appearance. Though bred in diplomacy, he was vivacious, quick-spirited, strong-willed, and impetuous; captivating by a frank straight-forward manner. He had the boldness, the nationality, the independence, of the first Pitt. In the open struggles and on the public stage of a representative government, he would have still more resembled that great statesman; but at a despotic court, supremely governed by the monarch's mistress, talents for intrigue necessarily filled the place of eloquence, and suppleness that of honesty. Such was the minister.

The Jesuits, instituted to support sacerdotal authority, proved the principal cause of its overthrow. Their ambition, their corporate spirit, excited fear and envy; their corruption of morality's plainest principles made them unpopular; and, finally, their efforts to master the throne excited a league of sovereign princas against them, which now produced their complete destruction. In their peril they clung around the church; any blow directed against them, especially those which ridicule aimed, fell upon it. Religion was at once sullied by their alliance, and weakened by their fall.

Their attempt was, in fact, to recover the ascendency which general ignorance had allowed to the priesthood of the middle ages. Some of the nobility entertained from time to time similar projects in favor of their order: the Jesuits not only conceived but realized their project. Masters of education and of the confessional, their plan was profoundly laid for universal sway over opinion. In this resuscitated attempt to gain ascendency, the priesthood found the same enemjes and opponents which had overthrown them in the fourteenth century. The legists, who then stood forth as champions of the royal authority, now battled for it as well as for popular rights. In Portugal, where the reign of the Jesuits seemed most assured, it was a lawyer, the marquis de Pombal, whe, arrived at the ministry, undermined and destroyed the order. Divers circumstances reinforcing the hatred of the judicial