not a dozen peasants were seen on either side of the route. Every thing was burnt up, destroyed, or removed. At the battle of Smolensko, the infantry alone were at first engaged, the cavalry on both sides lining the opposite banks of the river, in separate squadrons for a long distance, to prevent a surprise on either flank. But in the battle of Mojaisk, or Borodino, the cavalry had a large part. There he had two horses killed under him. Nothing can be said sufficient to give an idea of the horrors of that battle. The French troops, contrary to their usual custom, fought in a mournful silence. Ca valry and infantry, Cossacks and artillery, all were mixed together in the promiscuous carnage. The battle began at four in the morning, and the last cannon-shot was fired about nine at night. So dif ficult, however, is it to acquire the knowledge of truth, even from respectable eyewitnesses of great events, that he positively affirmed the French to have remained masters of the field. In proof of this, he alleged that his regiment continued on the ground that night, and was put in march at four o'clock next morning for Moscow. Doubtless, acting as captain of cavalry, enveloped in dust, and in perpetual motion, he could not properly judge of the great movements of the armies, and had mistaken a flank march for a direct advance in front. Yet, it is often on these partial views, that men are most po sitive in their opinions. At Moscow, the army found cloth, and at first plenty of coffee, chocolate, wine, furs, and luxuries, but little or no flour. Soon every thing became enormously dear. Long before the retreat began, subordination was lost amongst the troops; and it was the general opinion, that Bonaparte had been deceived by an appearance of negotiation, to lose so much time at Moscow. He was in the affair which took place previous to the retreat, in which he thought it extremely probable that the Russians took thirty-seven pieces of cannon, as stated by Beningsen, as he knew of twenty-five. It was a complete surprise; and Murat himself was nearly taken. For a long time his white plume, which, as King of Naples, he always wore in the field, was conspicuous amid hostile helmets and the spears of Cossacks; and it was only by a desperate. charge of his adherents that he was saved. It is impossible, by any description, to exaggerate the horrors of the retreat. It was three hundred thousand men put to suffer all that human nature could endure, without entire destruction. His horses all died, and he was obliged to walk in the severity of the cold with his feet nearly bare. He saw forty louis given for a place in a common cart, for a distance of thirty miles; and a General, after making a bargain of that kind, being benumbed by the cold, was pushed out by common soldiers, who had previously occupied the seats, and left to perish on the road. After innumerable hardships, he had with difficulty reached Poland, when his strength entirely failed him, and he lay ill for fifteen weeks at the house of an hospitable curate. From this, when pursuing his route on foot to his own country, the war broke out be tween Prussia and France; and after various adventures, he had been

arrested and confined in Silberberg. Both he and Perregaux talked with great contempt of the Cossacks, whom they agreed in affirming to be wholly useless in battles, and by no means remarkable for their bravery in skirmishes and single combats. Their great qualities are their cunning; their skill in concealing themselves, and suddenly ase sembling on given points; the intimate knowledge which they acquire of a country, and their unwearied patience. By these quali ties, they surround an enemy's army, as it were by an invisible line, interrupt his communications, and make prisoners perpetually. It is curious to see them make a charge. They advance in large masses; but in approaching the enemy, the bravest only press forward, whilst the others gradually check their career, in proportion to their want of courage. By this means, the whole mass assumes by degrees the rude appearance of a wedge, or of several wedges joined at the base. Should the attack of the foremost be successful, the rest cry 66 victory, " and share the glory; but if it fail, as against regular cavalry it is almost sure to do, they have at least the honour of leading the retreat. p. 166-172.

At length on the 30th of July, orders came to set our author at liberty, after having been eleven weeks in confinement, and above a month of the time in the most odious of dungeons. He says, he ascertained that Mr Merry, Lord Cathcart's private secretary, whose family knew him well, had repeatedly offered to ride over to Silberberg to identify him, but had never been permitted by his Lordship. This, and indeed the whole transaction, will doubtless be deemed a fit matter of explanation by Lord Cathcart. That a mistake may have been committed by the Russian and Prussian officers at head-quarters, in the hurry of such a moment as that of Mr Semple's arrival there-the eve of the great battle of Wurtzen-can easily be imagined; and though its consequences may have proved very painful to an innocent individual, we should not be prepared severely to condemn those who committed the blunder. But making every allowance for the situation of the Prussian or Russian officers, we are not quite prepared to give the same latitude to the British minister; and the suspicion seems all to have originated with him. Mr Semple's passport stated him to be an American born; he says that he gave a full explanation of this circumstance: But it is quite immaterial-for why should not an American show himself at the Russian head-quarters? Lord Cathcart was there as a foreigner himself; and Mr Semple, even if he had been an American, had as good a right as he to be on the spot. Yet from some confused notion of American and enemy being the same thing, Lord Cathcart seems to have procured his arrest. Perhaps it may be thought, that had others been disposed to imprison a person stating himself to be a British subject, the

British ambassador was called upon to have the truth of the matter examined-at all events, there can be but one opinion upon the manner of doing the act. Either Mr Semple's story above extracted, is wholly false, or every thing that was done, was without Lord Cathcart's knowledge, and he was grossly deceived by the people about him,―or his behaviour was such, as we are unwilling to designate. This charge coming against the noble envoy in a very moderate tone, and preferred by a gentleman of considerable respectability, who gives his name with his accusation, merits at all events a distinct answer. Mr George Jackson, too, seems called upon to explain his conduct; and we trust that those two diplomatists will speedily clear up to the world, the very unpleasant suspicions under which Mr Semple's narrative manifestly lays them.

The author returned to Berlin, and from thence he went to Stralsund, where he embarked for Ystadt in Sweden, and came by Gottenburg to England. This route is now so common, that we do not detain the reader with any notice of what Mr Semple observed in the course of it. We have already said, that the history of his detention forms the chief subject of the volume; and whatever particulars we have noted beside this narrative, are so much over and above what he professes to give. We hope soon to hear of him at the close of some new and less unfortunate journey; and exhort him to continue publishing his remarks in a plain manner,-adapted to all readers, and suited to all purchasers.

ART. XII. Carmen Triumphale for the Commencement of the Year 1814. By ROBERT SOUTHEY Esq. Poet Laureat. 4to. pp. 30. London.

E

1814.

We have always maintained that the writings of Mr Southey

were remarkable, not merely for affectation and bad taste, but for poetical genius of considerable magnitude. Our readers, we are persuaded, wili do us the justice to allow, that we have laboured long and zealously to convince them of this truth; and indeed there are not many things upon which we have been used to value ourselves more, than the firmness with which we have always stood ready to assert it, at the point of our pens, against all opposers. We cannot help owing him a little grudge, therefore, for putting us so unmercifully in the wrong, as he has done by this publication. As to the matter of taste and affectation, indeed, it has placed our opinion upon

more unquestionable grounds than it ever stood on before; but for genius and poetry, we really do not know how to name their names, in the face of such a strange farrago of bad psalmody and stupid newspapers-of such a base imitation of Sternhold and the Daily Advertiser, as now lies before us.

This marvellous falling off of Mr Southey, we are most willing to ascribe to the benumbing influence of that chaplet of Bays, with which the favour of the Prince Regent has recently adorned his brows. The laurel is well known to have the power of warding off the stroke of lightning from the heads which it covers; and we have long suspected it to possess the analogous quality of rendering them impervious to that subtler fluid, whatever it may be, in which poetical inspiration consists. Nothing else, we conceive, can account for the singular fact, that the odes of our poets laureat are invariably the dullest performances of the year; and, in general, go many degrees beyond any thing that the very same authors have been known to produce in that sort, before or after the period of their titular supremacy. We laud the Gods, therefore, for the narrow escape which our celebrated countryman Mr Scott is said to have had from this perilous honour-though we think it would have taken more than one branch of laurel to have subdued him to this lowness. '

There is nothing unprecedented, we readily admit, in this misadventure of Mr Southey's. On the contrary, it is so much a thing of course-for the Poet Laureat to make himself ridiculous, that we should scarcely have thought it worth while to record the event, had there not been something in the times and the subject that seemed, upon this occasion, to give him a chance of redemption; and to excite expectations, the disappointment of which it is not easy to bear in silence. After all, we believe, if Mr Southey had been contented with getting up an ode of the ordinary length, and, after having it set to music, had printed it, in a quiet way, in the newspapers and the Annual Registers, we should have let him slide down the smooth descent to oblivion, without any help or hindrance of ours; and seen his labours gathered to those of the Shadwells and Cibbers, and his other great predecessors, with as little sensation as on any former occasion. But when the Annual Ode is swelled to nineteen strophes, garnished with an ostentatious title, and printed in a four shilling quarto, with mottoes, notes, and other accompaniments of pretension, the case assumes a more serious aspect, and seems to call imperiously for our interposition.

The subject is the grand one of the approaching liberation of Europe from the tremendous thraldom of France; and noble

and inspiring as it is, it is treated by the laureat bard with such inconceivable tameness and sterility, that we have not been able to discover one striking thought, or glowing phrase-one trait of feeling, or spark of fancy,-nay, not even one bold image, or lofty expression, in the whole compass of his performance. To compensate for the want of all these, he shouts vehemently, as is his manner, seven several times, Glory to God, Deliver⚫ance to mankind!'-and then proceeds to tell the old story of the war in the Peninsula,-not merely for the last year, which is all that comes fairly within the province of a New-year poetbut for the five last campaigns;-and then, having spent fifteen strophes in praising the Wellesley,' as he affectedly calls Lord Wellington, and abusing the French in the dullest style, and meanest diction of a newspaper, he proceeds to say word or two on the exploits of the Northern Princes, and especially of the king of Prussia, whom he ingeniously designates by the name of the Brandenberg. He then dutifully congratulates Hanoyer on the restoration of its old illustrious line-speaks a word of comfort to the injured Hollanders-and ends with an anticipation of restoration and peace.

We are very well aware, that the mere argument or subject of an ode can give but little idea of its merits; and accordingly, it is more to the meanness of Mr Southey's materials, and the poorness of his execution, than to the faults of his general plan, that our objections are directed. The reader, however, shall now judge for himself of their fairness. We have said, that instead of kindling, with his mighty theme, to a true lyrical sublimity and rapture, he has handled it in the trite and creeping style of a dull daily paper; and we appeal to any competent judge of these matters, whether he would ever have suspected that a poet had got in among that meritorious race of journalists, if the dullest of them all had taken a review of the Spanish war in such a sentence as the following.

The heroic Spaniard first awoke from his trance. He broke his chains; and casting the treacherous yoke off his neck, he called on England, his generous enemy. For he knew well, that wherever wise policy prevailed, or brave despair, the succours of Britain would flow, and her arm be present. Then, too, regenerated Portugal displayed her antient virtue, all-too-long dormant; and rising against intolerable wrong, that faithful nation called in her distress upon England, her old ally. Her old ally obeyed the call, and her faithful friendship was well repaid. '

The most suspicious reader, we believe, could detect no indication of poetry in such a passage as this; and yet it is, literatim et verbatim, one of Mr Southey's finest stanzas-divested