of the French, has
exchanged orders with him, and has sent an extraordinary Ambassador to be
present at his coronation,--not common compliments, even between Princes
connected by the nearest ties of friendship and consanguinity. Under his
administration, the Rhine has been passed to seize the Duc d'Enghien, and
the Elbe to capture Sir George Rumbold; the Hanse Towns have been
pillaged, and even Emden blockaded; and the representations against, all
these outrages have neither been followed by public reparation nor a
becoming resentment; and was it not also Baron von Hardenberg, who, on
the 5th of April, 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe
all our conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters? It is not
probable that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if
self-preservation does not require it.

Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned nobleman and an enlightened
statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the choice
of his Prince. The late Frederick William II. nominated him a Minister
of State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet. On the 26th of January, 1792,
as a directorial Minister, he took possession, in the name of the King of
Prussia, of the Margravates of Anspach and Bayreuth, and the inhabitants
swore before him, as their governor, their oaths of allegiance to their
new Sovereign.--He continued to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these
States, until March, 1795, when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator
with our republican plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling
all differences between Prussia and France, he returned to his former
post at Anspach, where no complaints have been heard against his
Government.

The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the place
he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain such
information as would enable him to fill it with distinction. I have
heard it said that in most countries he had for years kept and paid
private agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent him reports
of what they heard or saw of political intrigue or machinations. One of
these his agents I happened to meet with, in 1796, at Basle, and were I
to conclude from what I observed in him, the Minister has not been very
judicious in his selection of private correspondents. Figure to yourself
a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high,
deaf as a post, stammering and mak