The terms of peace originally offered by Talleyrand and conveyed to Mr. Fox by Ld. Y. were very advantageous to this country; indeed, so extremely so, that as the proposals were verbally made, much doubt was entertained of Ld. Y.’s accuracy in reporting them, and he owed entirely his being employed in the negotiation to the doubts of his veracity. The _uti possidetis_ on both sides was to be the basis of the treaty. Hanover was to be restored to the K. of E., in return for our acknowledgment of Bonaparte’s newly-created Kings. No further changes were to be made in Germany or Switzerland. The integrity of Spain and Portugal was to be guaranteed in both Hemispheres. We were not to interfere with the settlement of Italy or Holland. Upon a distant hint being thrown out about commercial arrangements, ‘Nous voulons être maîtres chez nous’ was the reply. When Sicily was mentioned, _Talleyrand_, who had spoken the above, exclaimed, ‘Mais que voulez vous? Vous l’avez.’ Our Cabinet readily assented to these terms (in addition to which it was hinted that Bonaparte was disposed to concur with Mr. F. in taking measures for the general abolition of the Slave Trade, but this was intended as a sneer. When Talleyrand read the resolutions of the H. of Commons upon the subject of the S. Trade, he said there was another Act of Parliament much more necessary, one for which the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Germans called out most loudly, ‘_Et cette acte du Parlement, c’est la paix_’), and Ld. Y. was sent back to Paris with full assent to his message. But when he arrived there he found the views of the French Governt. materially changed in the most important point. They now demanded that Sicily should be ceded to them in order to be re-annexed to the kingdom of Naples. Joseph, the new King, had represented that his kingdom of Naples would not be secure without the possession of Sicily, and the French engineers had given in a report that Sicily could be subdued with much more ease than they had at first supposed. On these grounds, which the French have the assurance to represent as _new occurrences_ since their first overtures to Ld. Y., they pretend to justify their deviation from their original proposals, and they offered to the King of Sicily, in exchange for that island, to make him King of Dalmatia and Albania.[214] D’Oubril, the Russian negotiator, who was by this time at Paris, and who had been privy to everything done by our Cabinet, was caught by this last proposal, and expressed his opinion decidedly in favour of it. In the cession of Dalmatia to the King of Sicily, he fancied that he saw the elevation of power which would remove the French to a greater distance from the frontiers of Turkey, and prove in future a bulwark against the extension of their empire in that quarter. He was ready, as Mr. Fox observed, to sacrifice a well-understood English object to an ill-defined Russian one. This modification of the original