reproached the departing general with his celebrated proclamation against France in 1792, with the result of his unhappy campaign in that country, with the recent summons by which the French had been required to retreat beyond the Rhine. He charged him as having been the instigator of a war which his counsels ought to have prevented. He announced the right which he had acquired, to leave not one stone standing upon another in the town of Brunswick; and summed up his ungenerous reply by intimating, that though he might treat the subjects of the duke like a generous victor, it was his purpose to deprive the dying prince and his family of their hereditary sovereignty.[245] As if to fulfil these menaces, the French troops approached the city of Brunswick; and the wounded veteran, dreading the further resentment of his ungenerous victor, was compelled to cause himself to be removed to the neutral town of Altona, where he expired.[246] An application from his son, requesting permission to lay his father's body in the tomb of his ancestors, was rejected with the same sternness which had characterised Buonaparte's answer to the attempt of the duke, when living, to soften his enmity. The successor of the duke vowed, it is believed, to requite these insults with mortal hatred--did much to express it during his life--and bequeathed to his followers the legacy of revenge,[247] which the Black Brunswickers had the means of amply discharging upon the 18th of June, 1815. Some have imputed this illiberal conduct of Buonaparte to an ebullition of spleen against the object of his personal dislike; others have supposed that his resentment was, in whole or in part, affected in order to ground upon it his resolution of confiscating the state of Brunswick, and uniting it with the kingdom of Westphalia, which, as we shall presently see, he proposed to erect as an appanage for his brother Jerome. Whether arising from a burst of temperament, or a cold calculation of interested selfishness, his conduct was equally unworthy of a monarch and a soldier. At Potsdam and at Berlin, Napoleon showed himself equally as the sworn and implacable enemy, rather than as the generous conqueror. At Potsdam he seized on the sword, belt, and hat of the Great Frederick, and at Berlin he appropriated and removed to Paris the monument of Victory, erected by the same monarch, in consequence of the defeat of the French at Rosbach.[248] The finest paintings and works of art in Prussia were seized upon for the benefit of the French National Museum.