And so are we coming to the close of our Tour--our next stage will be Rotterdam, from whence I shall bear my own dispatches.... In the course of my life this last month will bear a conspicuous place from the interesting and delightful scenes it has afforded me. I must confess I left England with some waverings and misgivings; the accounts of others led me to expect that disappointments, difficulties, and great expense would be the inevitable accompaniments of my course. But in no instance have I been disappointed, the difficulties too trifling to deserve the name, the expense nothing compared with the profits derived, and I have seen enough of men and manners, of things animate and inanimate, to make me quite at home in some of the great scenes which have just been performed.... [Illustration: DUTCH CARRIAGE.] CHAPTER VI THE WATERLOO YEAR Lord Sheffield's forebodings--Talleyrand and the Senate--Vagabond Royalty--Mr. North and Napoleon--The rout of the Bourbon Government. 1814-1816. The two years which intervened between Edward Stanley's second and third visits to France saw the Empire regained and lost by Napoleon, and the French Crown lost and regained by Louis XVIII. In spite of the rose-coloured description of the comforts and pleasures of his journey with which the correspondence of 1814 closes, neither the Rector nor his brother found it possible to travel on the Continent in 1815, which Lady Maria had foretold would be "a much more favourable time." Such hopes must soon have been dashed by the proceedings of the Congress of Vienna, which, as was said, "danse mais n'avance pas," and gloomy forebodings are shewn in two letters from Lord Sheffield to his son-in-law, which were received at Alderley in the autumn of 1814 and the spring of 1815. The first gives Lord Sheffield's view of the situation, and the second describes Napoleon's own remarks upon it to Lord Sheffield's nephew, Mr. Frederick Douglas. _Lord Sheffield to Sir John Stanley_. SHEFFIELD PLACE, _October 30, 1814_. It is time I should provoke some symptom of your existence. I have no letters from Frederick North,[94] but I can acquaint you that we had himself here, which is still better, and that he has been infinitely entertaining, after three or four months' tour on the Continent, from whence he arrived about three weeks ago, and where he proposes to return next week, to pass the winter at Nice with the Glenbervies and Lady Charlotte Lindsay, who are gone there, and, I might add, with many other English families. I begin to think I shall have more acquaintances on the Continent than in England; the migration there is beyond calculation. The present is an anxious period. Perhaps there isn't in the History of the world a more complete instance of political imbecility than was exhibited in the late Peace at Paris, especially in the Allies not availing themselves of the very extraordinary opportunity of securing the tranquillity of Europe for a long time.