with the short frock and leathern belt, the admirers of Schiller and Goëthe, and, more than all, the noble worshippers of the Queen of Prussia, who came to claim the spoils of France; for the revered image of the heroic Louisa, oppressed and calumniated by Napoleon, was mingled in all their dreams. The despatches of Hardenberg, while the negotiations of Paris were in progress, bore the impress of this bent in Germany, and in fact of the whole of his German existence. From the time he first took part in public affairs, he particularly interested himself in every thing concerning the confederation; his influence alone had induced Prussia to enter into the system of neutrality and centralisation, which became the national law of Germany from the time of the French revolution; and now these same interests were placed under his supreme direction. Germany, which had so long been endangered by French principles, was desirous of reacting against that power; and everywhere declared and averred, that Alsace and Lorraine had been taken from her, and that they ought to be restored to their elder sister; conquest alone had given them to France, and a reverse of fortune might deprive her of them. Prince Hardenberg set forth these ideas, and supported them at the conference in Paris; he asserted that the Rhine was not natural to France, but was, on the contrary, offensive to Germany; Strasburg is a threatening position, and so would be Mayence; the Vosges and the Moselle were the limits he was desirous of assigning as a disgrace to us, and this desire proceeded less from his own mind than from the detestation Germany had vowed against us: it was the reaction of liberalism against Napoleon, extending almost to the partition of France. I have already described how M. de Richelieu preserved us from this great misfortune, by appealing to the Emperor Alexander, more disinterested in the question of partition, and who interposed in favour of our vanquished country. Notwithstanding this, the sacrifices imposed upon us by the treaty of Paris were sufficiently heavy. Hardenberg was one of those who signed it, and the influence he had exerted gave him very great claims upon the confidence of his sovereign. He became, in the Prussian cabinet, the representative of the Anglo-German alliance; renewing the union between the Tory party and the German aristocracy, whose fundamental principle was a hatred and hostility towards France, dating as far back as the battle of Fontenoy, where the troops of the Duke of Cumberland were humbled before the fortune of Louis XV.