GREAT BRITAIN.

CHAPTER CXXVII-LAST TWO HANOVERIANS.

THE smoke of the Battle of Waterloo rolled back to the borders of Belgium, and then to the confines of Europe. A field of desolation was revealed without a parallel in modern history. The wrecks lay heaped on every coast. It was at once apparent that a bloody transformation had been effected among the Western nations. Nor might the prescience of statesman or philosopher discover in the existing condition the true results of the Revolutionary conflict.

One of the first facts discoverable in the then condition of Western Europe was that Great Britain had been least of all shaken from her political moorings. It was discerned, as the roar of battle receded to the horizon, that England had, even through the epoch of turmoil and violence, held on her tedious and labored course, like a heavy ship, toiling with the breakers, battered with the storms, but, nevertheless, essentially sound in her structure. It could but be acknowledged, moreover, that Great Britain only had emerged from the conflict of twenty years' duration with military honor and civil precedence. It was by the indomitable courage of the English soldiers, as much as by the half-accidental coming of Blucher, that the Imperial eagle of France had been struck to the dust on the plateau of Mont St. Jean. Through his whole career, the Corsican had found no other foe which he so much dreaded as England. With that all-prevailing discernment wherewith he surveyed the field of Europe and made it the chessboard for his mighty game, he recognized that the player who sat in the fogs of the British Islands was his real antagonist. He well knew that the free institutions of England, as well as the native vigor of the English race, had conspired to develop in the Saxon Isles a civil and military power of which even his Imperial France might well stand in awe. During the whole period of the Republic, the Consulate, and the Empire, the Government of Great Britain maintained an attitude of sullen and unyielding hostility, first to the republican tendencies of the French Nation, but more particularly to Napoleon himself. On many occasions the conduct of England towards France was of a kind not to be justified in honorable diplomacy. Sometimes, indeed,