olice filled the ears of the Emperor with
reports of men's private conversation. Citizens were daily removed from
their families, and buried in remote and inaccessible dungeons, for no
reason but that they had dared to speak what the immense majority of
their neighbours thought. His quarrels with Lucien, who had contracted a
marriage unsuitable, in the Emperor's opinion, to his rank, were so
indecently violent, that that ablest of his brothers at length sought a
refuge in England, where he remained during several years. The total
slavery of the press, its audacious lies, and more audacious silence,
insulted the common sense of all men. Disaffection was secretly, but
rapidly, eating into the heart of his power; and yet, as if blinded to
all consequences by some angry infliction of heaven, the irritable
ambition of Napoleon was already tempting another great foreign enemy
into the field.

When the Emperor of Russia was informed of Buonaparte's approaching
nuptials with the Austrian princess, his first exclamation was, "Then
the next thing will be to drive us back into our forests." In truth the
conferences of Erfurt had but skinned over a wound, which nothing could
have cured but a total alteration of Napoleon's policy. The Russian
nation suffered so much from the "continental system," that the
sovereign soon found himself compelled to relax the decrees drawn up at
Tilsit in the spirit of those of Berlin and Milan. Certain harbours were
opened partially for the admission of colonial produce, and the export
of native productions; and there ensued a series of indignant
reclamations on the part of Napoleon, and haughty evasions on that of
the Czar, which, ere long, satisfied all near observers that Russia
would not be slow to avail herself of any favourable opportunity of once
more appealing to arms. The Spanish insurrection, backed by the
victories of Lord Wellington, must have roused alike the hope and the
pride of a young and ambitious prince, placed at the head of so great a
nation; the inference naturally drawn from Napoleon's marriage into the
house of Austria was, that the whole power of that monarchy would,
henceforth, act in unison with his views--in other words, that were the
Peninsula once thoroughly subdued, the whole of Western Europe would be
at his command, for any service he might please to dictate. It would
have been astonishing if, under such circumstances, the ministers of
Alexander had not desired to brin