editor scornfully rejects our practical opinion on the probability of restoring the Bourbons, because it seems we always reject every proposition that makes the continuance of war necessary. Be it so. But do not these persons also attach the highest degree of probability, or, when they are so inclined, moral certainty, to every thing that tends to make peace unattainable? It is true we did not, as they say, anticipate the reverses of the French Emperor before they happened. If we did not anticipate them before, it was because we had nothing in past experience to guide us to such a conclusion, except, indeed, the constant unverified predictions of _The Times_ and _The Courier_. If these inspired writers had the slightest intimation of them one moment before they happened, we are willing to bow down to them, and they shall be our Gods. But of this we are sure, from all experience, that the way to render the fruits of those reverses uncertain, or to defeat them altogether, is the very mode of proceeding recommended by the ceaseless partizans of interminable hostilities. If the French are a nation of men—if they have the common faculties of memory, of understanding, and foresight; if they are, as they have been pronounced by one no ways favourable to them, ‘the most civilized, and with one exception, the most enlightened people in Europe,’ surely, if any thing can kindle in their minds ‘the flame of sacred vehemence, and move the very stones to mutiny,’ it is the letting loose upon them the mohawks of Europe, the Cossacks, with General Blucher’s manifesto in their hands. It is restoring to Bonaparte the very weapon which we had wrested from him, the mighty plea of the independence of nations; it is reclothing his power with those adamantine scales ‘which fear no discipline of human hands,’ the hearts and wills of a whole people, threatened with emasculation of their moral and physical powers, by half a dozen libellers of the human species, and a horde of barbarians scarcely human. Even the writer in _The Times_ acknowledges that the Cossacks entering France as a sort of masters of the ceremonies to the Bourbons, is only better, and less likely to excite horror and dismay, than their entering it in their own rights and persons. It may be so. The bear bringing in the monkey on his back may be more inviting than the bear alone. But we should think that either portent must be fatal, that neither hieroglyphic will be favourably interpreted. ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS ‘Those nauseous harlequins in farce may pass, But there goes more to a substantial ass; Our modern wits such monstrous fools have shewn, They seem not of Heaven’s making but their own.’—DRYDEN. _Dec. 2, 1813._