ambition.
His subsequent proceedings, in regard to Holland, Oldenburg, and other
territories, and the distribution of his troops, in Pomerania and
Poland, could not fail to strengthen Alexander in this view of the case;
and if war must come, there could be no question as to the policy of
bringing it on before Austria had entirely recovered from the effects of
the campaign of Wagram, and, above all, while the Peninsula continued to
occupy 200,000 of Buonaparte's troops.

Before we return to the war in Portugal (the details of which belong to
the history of Wellington, rather than of Napoleon), we may here notice
very briefly one or two circumstances connected with the exiled family
of Spain. It affords a melancholy picture of the degradation of the old
king and queen, that these personages voluntarily travelled to Paris for
the purpose of mingling in the crowd of courtiers congratulating their
deceiver and spoiler on the birth of the king of Rome. Their daughter,
the queen of Etruria, appears to have been the least degenerate of the
race; and she accordingly met with the cruellest treatment from the hand
which her parents were thus mean enough to kiss. She had been deprived
of her kingdom at the period of the shameful scenes of Bayonne in 1807,
on pretext that that kingdom would afford the most suitable
indemnification for her brother Ferdinand on his cession to Buonaparte
of his rights in Spain, and with the promise of being provided for
elsewhere. This promise to the sister was no more thought of afterwards
than the original scheme for the indemnification of the brother. Tuscany
became a French department. Ferdinand was sent a prisoner to the castle
of Valencay--a seat of Talleyrand--and she, after remaining for some
time with her parents, took up her residence, as a private person, under
_surveillance_, at Nice. Alarmed by the severity with which the police
watched her, the queen at length made an attempt to escape to England.
Her agents were discovered, tried by a military commission, and shot;
and the unfortunate lady herself confined in a Roman monastery. A plan
for the liberation of Ferdinand was about the same time detected by the
emissaries of the French police: the real agent being arrested, a
pretender, assuming his name and credentials, made his way into
Valencay, but Ferdinand was either too cunning, or too timid to incur
this danger; revealing to his jailers the proposals of the stranger, he
escaped the sna