The influence of the Duke of Wellington naturally increased after this great battle; he was advancing at the head of a victorious army, and though Blucher did not actually fill a subordinate situation, yet the Duke, from his being covered with the glory of Waterloo, could not fail to exercise a considerable influence over the mind of the Prussian generalissimo. At last, when they approached Paris, all the revolutionary party, with Fouché at their head, came to meet the Duke, considering him as the supreme arbiter, whose word was to decide upon the fate of France. Fouché opened an active negotiation with him for the occupation of France; and the noble Duke, in a conversation with Louis XVIII., recommended the ministry of Talleyrand and Fouché, as the only one capable of bringing about an union between royalty and the liberty obtained by the revolution. Was the Duke mistaken? or was he duped? Whichever may have been the case, the coalition fell to pieces almost immediately, and the powerful and long-continued ascendency of Lord Castlereagh and the English government was replaced by the personal influence of the Emperor Alexander. Talleyrand was succeeded by the Duke de Richelieu. By the treaty concluded in the month of November 1815, it had been stipulated that an army of occupation should remain in France; and it was placed under the command of the Duke of Wellington, without making any distinction among the contingents furnished by the different powers. He was also appointed inspector of the fortresses in the Low Countries, which were erected as advanced posts against France, and with the money levied upon her. The generalissimo resided in Paris, where he saw a good deal of Louis XVIII.; and his English principles were in perfect agreement with a system of moderation and freedom. He possessed an honest and upright heart, and a habit of judging with ease and simplicity of the state of events; and we must do him the justice to say, that when on various occasions he was constituted arbiter of the claims of the Allies, he almost invariably gave his opinion in favour of our unfortunate country. Even when he was consulted, more than once, upon the possibility of diminishing the army of occupation, he declared that the state of the public mind in France would permit this relief to be granted, which the suffering condition of the country rendered imperatively necessary. At this period, when the Duke of Wellington was engaged in rendering us most essential service, the Buonapartist spirit armed a fanatic against his life, and a pistol was fired actually into his carriage. The Duke escaped unhurt; and I deeply regret that Napoleon, in his will written at St. Helena, should have degraded himself to such a degree as to award a recompense to the miscreant who had thus attacked his former military adversary. Conduct like this communicates a stain which cannot be effaced even from the most renowned characters in history.