It was well for Great Britain and for the continent that Buonaparte was not contented with such terms of peace as the allies, with a generosity which had neither the character of wisdom nor of justice, would a little before this have granted him. Even when he had been driven over the Rhine, they would, according to their own declaration, have left France more powerful than she had ever been under her kings, if he would have consented to give up Italy. Out of Germany and out of the Peninsula he had been beaten; but they would have allowed France to remain with the whole of the Netherlands, and with the Rhine for her boundary, if vain-glory and a blind confidence in his fortune had not still demented Buonaparte. But he declared that he would not under any circumstances abandon Italy; and they who ought not, under any circumstances, now to have negotiated with him, prepared to enter France. On his part he collected the largest force that that exhausted country could supply, to resist the impending invasion; and as it thus became an object of great importance for him to bring to his assistance Suchet’s army, and the troops who were shut up in the remaining garrisons in Valencia and Catalonia, he thought this might be effected by dictating a treaty to ♦BUONAPARTE TREATS WITH FERDINAND.♦ his prisoner, Ferdinand. Accordingly he sent the Comte de Laforest to Valençay, to negotiate with that poor Prince, saying, that under the existing circumstances of his empire and his policy, he wished at once to settle the affairs of Spain; that England was encouraging Jacobinism and anarchy there, for the purpose of destroying the nobility and the monarchy, and erecting a republic; that he could not but grievously feel the destruction of a neighbouring state, connected by so many maritime and commercial interests with his own; that he desired to remove every pretext for English interference, and to re-establish those ties of friendship and good neighbourhood by which Spain and France had been so long connected; and therefore he had sent the Comte de Laforest under a feigned name, to whom his Royal Highness might give entire credit in all that he should propose. ♦CONFERENCE BETWEEN COMTE DE LAFOREST AND FERDINAND.♦