Neither did Fouché's selection of a military chief to command the new levies, prove more acceptable. Bernadotte, whom we have noticed as a general of republican fame, had been, at the time of Buonaparte's elevation, opposed to his interests, and attached to those of the Directory. Any species of rivalry, or pretence of dispute between them, was long since ended; yet still Bernadotte was scarce accounted an attached friend of the Emperor, though he was in some sort connected with the house of Napoleon, having married a sister-in-law of Joseph, the intrusive King of Spain[4]. In the campaign of Vienna, which we have detailed, Bernadotte, (created Prince of Ponte Corvo,) commanded a division of Saxons, and had incurred Buonaparte's censure more than once, and particularly at the battle of Wagram, for the slowness of his movements. The Prince of Ponte Corvo came, therefore, to Paris in a sort of disgrace, where Fouché, in conjunction with Clarke, the minister at war, invited him to take on himself the defence of Antwerp. Bernadotte hesitated to accept the charge; but having at length done so, he availed himself of the time afforded by the English to put the place in a complete state of defence, and assembled within, and under its walls, above thirty thousand men. The country was inundated by opening the sluices; strong batteries were erected on both sides of the Scheldt, and the ascending that river became almost impossible.[5] The British naval and military officers also disagreed among themselves, as often happens where difficulties multiply, and there appears no presiding spirit to combat and control them. The final objects of the expedition were therefore abandoned; the navy returned to the English ports, and the British forces were concentrated--for what reason, or with what expectation, it is difficult to see--in that fatal conquest, the isle of Walcheren. Among the marshes, stagnant canals, and unwholesome trenches of this island, there broods continually, a fever of a kind deeply pestilential and malignant, and which, like most maladies of the same description, is more destructive to strangers than to the natives, whose constitutions become by habit proof against its ravages. This dreadful disease broke out among our troops with the force of a pestilence, and besides the numerous victims who died on the spot, shattered, in many cases for ever, the constitution of the survivors. The joy with which Napoleon saw the army of his enemy thus consigned to an obscure and disgraceful death, broke out even in his bulletins, as if the pestilence under which they fell had been caused by his own policy, and was not the consequence of the climate, and of the ill-advised delay which prevented our soldiers being withdrawn from it. "We are rejoiced," he said, in a letter to the minister at war, "to see that the English have packed themselves in the morasses of Zealand. Let them be only kept in check, and the bad air and fevers peculiar to the