weak-minded despot.

At the same time when Nelson delivered Naples from the French, a party
of English seamen, under Commodore Trowbridge, had landed at the mouth
of the Tiber, marched to Rome, and restored the Pope. The French army,
after the great victory which gave them back Lombardy and Piedmont,
doubted not that the re-establishment of "the Roman Republic" would be
one of its next consequences. But Buonaparte, who had in the interim
re-opened the churches of France, was now disposed to consider the
affairs of the Pope with very different eyes. In a word, he had already
resolved to make use of the Holy Father in the consolidation of his own
power as a monarch; and, as the first step to this object, the
government of the Pope was now suffered to continue--not a little to the
astonishment of the French soldiery, and to the confusion, it may be
added, and regret, of various powers of Europe.

The First Consul, meanwhile, proceeded to turn the friendship of the
Russian Emperor to solid account. It has never, in truth, been difficult
to excite angry and jealous feelings, among the minor maritime powers,
with regard to the naval sovereignty of England. The claim of the right
of searching neutral ships, and her doctrine on the subject of
blockades, had indeed been recognised in many treaties by Russia, and by
every maritime government in Europe. Nevertheless, the old grudge
remained; and Buonaparte now artfully employed every engine of diplomacy
to awaken a spirit of hostility against England, first, in the
well-prepared mind of the Czar, and then in the cabinets of Prussia,
Denmark, and Sweden. The result was, in effect, a coalition of these
powers against the mistress of the seas; and, at the opening of the
nineteenth century, England had to contemplate the necessity of
encountering single-handed the colossal military force of France, and
the combined fleets of Europe. To deepen the shadows of her prospects at
that great crisis of her history, the people suffered severely under a
scarcity of food, in consequence of bad harvests; and the efforts which
England made, under such an accumulation of adverse circumstances, must
ever be treasured among the proudest of her national recollections.

In January, 1801, the first imperial parliament of Great Britain and
Ireland assembled; and, shortly afterwards, in consequence of a
difference of opinion, touching the Roman Catholic Question, between
George III. and Mr. Pitt, that g