act stains the history of the
time. It proved as impossible for England to defend as for America to
forget. The war ended at last, after the commerce of both countries
had been gravely injured, in a grotesque treaty of peace, signed at
Ghent, in which the principal cause of the war, the impressment of
American sailors by English ships, was not even alluded to. But as the
impressment was abandoned by England, the war had not been waged wholly
in vain.

In the year that followed upon the Battle of Waterloo, Sheridan died.
He had outlived by ten years his great contemporaries Pitt and Fox, by
nearly twenty years his greatest contemporary Burke, and by more than
thirty years his great contemporary Johnson. The pompous funeral that
carried his remains to Westminster Abbey was the funeral not merely of
a man but of an age. He was almost the last of the great heroic
figures that made the eighteenth century famous. He had long outlived
all the friends, heroes, rivals of his glorious prime: he could talk to
the children of the dawning century of Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Sir
Joshua Reynolds; of Burke, and Pitt, and Fox; of poets and painters,
players, and politicians, who seemed to his listeners to belong to a
departed Age of Gold. Two years later, in the November of 1818,
England, and indeed the whole civilized world, received a sudden and
painful shock by the death, under conditions peculiarly harrowing, of
Sir Samuel Romilly, the great lawyer, social reformer, and
philanthropist. Romilly had been deeply attached to his wife, and on
her death in October of that year, it would seem that he must have lost
his reason, for, in the following month, he committed suicide. Romilly
was a man of the highest principles, and the most austere conscience,
and although the loss of his much-loved wife must have made the world
but a mere {347} ruin to him, it is not believed that, if his mind had
not suddenly given away, he would have done himself to death with his
own hand. To Napoleon, then fretting in exile in St. Helena, the deed
appeared to be one curiously characteristic of the English people.
"The English character is superior to ours. Conceive Romilly, one of
the leaders of a great party, committing suicide at fifty because he
had lost his wife. They are in everything more practical than we are;
they emigrate, they marry, they kill themselves with less indecision
than we display in going to the opera." Napoleon was wrong