The invasion of Russia was a blow aimed _expressly_ at England. Its object was the extinction of English commerce in the whole sea-line of the north--that invasion was punished, by the ruin of the whole veteran army of France! Napoleon himself at length met the troops of England. He met them with an arrogant assumption of victory--"Ah! je les tiens, ces Anglais." Never was presumption more deeply punished. This single conflict _destroyed_ him; his laurels, his diadem, and his dynasty, were blasted together! It is not less memorable, that during the entire Revolutionary war, France was never suffered to inflict an injury on England; with one exception--the perfidious seizure of the English travelling in the French territories under the safeguard of the Imperial passports. But this, too, had its punishment--and one of the most especial and characteristic retribution--Napoleon himself was sent to a dungeon! By a fate unheard of even among fallen princes, the man who had treacherously made prisoners of the English was himself made a prisoner, was delivered into English hands, was consigned to captivity in an English island, and died the prisoner of England! I speak of events like these, not in the spirit of superstition, nor in the fond presumption of being an interpreter of the mysterious ways of Providence. I record them, in a full consciousness of the immeasurable distance between the intellect of man and the wisdom of the supreme Disposer. But they convey, at least to my own feelings, a confidence, a solemn security, a calm yet ardent conviction, that chance has no share in the government of the world; that the great tide of things, in its rise and fall, has laws, which, if unapproached by the feebleness of human faculties, are not the less true, vast, and imperishable; that if, like the air, the agency of that ruling and boundless authority is invisible, we may yet feel its existence in its effects, rejoice in the acknowledgment of a power which nothing can exhaust, and take to our bosoms the high consolation, that the good of man is the supreme principle of the system. * * * * *