was more than courtesy required, more than an ally was entitled to expect, and perhaps he felt that it was more than a King of Spain ought to perform. Cevallos constantly advised him not to leave his capital till he had received certain intelligence that Buonaparte had passed the Pyrenees, and was approaching Madrid; and even then he urged him to proceed so short a way, that it should not be necessary for him to sleep out of his capital more than a single night. His advice prevailed for a time against the repeated solicitations of Murat and the ambassador Beauharnois. It became necessary, therefore, to introduce a new actor in this detestable plot. ♦THE SWORD OF FRANCIS I. RESTORED TO THE FRENCH.♦ During the interval which elapsed before another agent could appear, Murat informed Cevallos that the Emperor would be gratified if the sword of Francis I. were presented to him; and he desired that this might be intimated to the new King. It might be supposed that this was designed not merely to gratify the French nation, but also to lower Ferdinand in the opinion of the Spaniards, if Buonaparte and his agents had ever taken the nobler feelings of our nature into their calculation. But it was a mere trick for the Parisians; and neither they nor the tyrant himself felt that France was far more dishonoured by the circumstances under which the sword was recovered, than by the ♦MARCH 31.♦ manner in which it had been lost. Accordingly this trophy of Pescara’s victory, which had lain since the year 1525 in the royal armoury at Madrid, was carried in a silver basin, under a silken cloth laced and fringed with gold, to Murat’s head-quarters, in a coach and six, preceded by six running footmen, and under the charge of the superintendent of the arsenal; the grand equerry and the Duke del Parque following in a second equipage with the same state. A detachment of the guards escorted them, and the sword was presented by the Marquis of Astorga to Murat; he, it was said, having been brought up by the side of the Emperor, and in the same school, and illustrious for his military talents, was more worthy than any other person could be to be charged with so precious a deposit, and to transmit it into the hands of his Imperial Majesty. The people of Madrid passively beheld the surrender of this trophy; it was the act, however compulsory, of their lawful king, the king of their choice; the compulsion was neither avowed on the one side, nor confessed on the other; from the imputation of beholding it with indifference, they amply redeemed themselves. Murat, upon receiving it, pronounced a flattering eulogium upon the Spanish nation, ... that nation which he was in the act of plundering, and which he came to betray and to enslave. ♦ALARM OF THE PEOPLE.♦