Lord Liverpool was a man equally fitted for his time. The war had triumphantly closed. But, a period of perturbed feelings and financial necessities followed. It required in the minister a combination of sound sense and practical vigour--of deference for the public feelings, yet respect for the laws--of promptitude in discovering national resources, and yet of firmness in repelling factious change. The head of the cabinet possessed those qualities. Without brilliancy, without eloquence, without accomplished literature; still, no man formed his views with a clearer intelligence; and no man pursued them with more steady determination. Perhaps disdaining the glitter of popularity, no minister, for the last half century, had been so singularly exempt from all the sarcasms of public opinion. The nation relied on his sincerity, honoured his purity of principle, and willingly confided its safety to hands which none believed capable of a stain. But the characters of those three ministers were striking in a still higher point of view. Their qualities seem to have been expressly constructed to meet the peculiar exigency of their times. Perceval--acute, strict, and with strong religious conceptions--to meet a period, when religious laxity in the cabinet had already enfeebled the defence of the national religion. Castlereagh--stately, bold, and high-toned--to meet a period, when the fate of Europe was to be removed from cabinets to the field, and when he was to carry the will of England among assembled monarchs. Liverpool--calm, rational, and practical; the man of conscience and common sense--for the period, when the great questions of religion had been quieted, the great questions of the war had died with the war, and when the supreme difficulty of government was, to reconcile the pressure of financial exigency with the progress of the people--to invigorate the public frame without inflaming it by dangerous innovation--and to reconstruct the whole commercial constitution, without infringing on those principles which had founded the prosperity of the empire. At length the consummation came: the French empire fell on the field by the hand of England. All the sovereigns of Europe rushed in to strip the corpse, and each carried back a portion of the spoils. But the conqueror was content with the triumph, and asked no more of glory than the liberation of mankind. While all was public exultation for this crowning event, fortune had not neglected to reward the gentler virtues of one worthy of its noblest gifts. In my first campaign with the Prussian troops in France, I had intrusted to the care of the old domestic whom I found in the Chateau de Montauban, an escritoire and a picture, belonging to the family of Clotilde. The old man had disappeared; and I took it for granted that he had been plundered, or had died.