Before there was any declaration of war, the King of France, on the 18th of March, issued an[255] order to seize all British ships in the ports of that kingdom; and, nine days afterwards, a similar order was issued by the British Government as to all French ships in their harbours. The first act of hostility was perpetrated by Admiral Keppel. He had been appointed first Admiral on the earliest news of the treaty of France with America; and, being now in the Channel with twenty ships of the line, he discovered two French frigates, La Licorne and La Belle Poule, reconnoitring his fleet. Not troubling himself that there had been no declaration of war, Keppel ordered some of his vessels to give chase; and, on coming up with the Licorne, a gun was fired over her, to call her to surrender; and the Frenchman struck his colours, but not before he had poured a broadside into the America, commanded by Lord Longford, and wounded four of his men. The "saucy" Arethusa, famed in song and story, in the meantime, had come up with the Belle Poule, and, after a desperate action, drove her in amongst the rocks, whilst the Arethusa herself was so disabled as to require towing back to the fleet. A schooner and a French frigate were soon afterwards taken; and, finding on board these vessels papers stating that the fleet in Brest harbour consisted of thirty-two sail of the line and ten or twelve frigates, Keppel returned to Portsmouth for reinforcements.
ONE:The Treaty of Amiens did not for a moment, even in appearance, interrupt the unlimited plans of aggression which Buonaparte had formed. Whether these plans tended to alarm Britain or not gave him no concern whatever. The encroachments on Italy never paused. Before the signing of the Peace of Amiens, Buonaparte had made himself President of the Cisalpine Republic; and though he had pledged himself to Alexander of Russia that he would not interfere further with Piedmont, because Alexander would not entertain the scheme of co-operating with France in the march to India, as his father had done, Buonaparte seized on all Piedmont in September of this year, annexed it to France, and divided it into six Departments. Charles Emmanuel, the King of Piedmont, retired to his island of Sardinia, and then abdicated in favour of his brother Victor Emmanuel. But Victor Emmanuel would not have been left long king, even of that small territory, had it not been for the protection of Britain. In October he annexed Parma and Placentia. He next made an agreement with the[487] King of Naples for Elba, and took possession of it. Every movement of this restless being showed his intention to drive Britain out of the Mediterranean, and convert it into a French lake. But on the mainland he was equally active. There was no country on the Continent in which Buonaparte did not presume to dictate, as if he already were universal monarch. In the Diet of Germany his influence was prominently conspicuous, and he prevailed to have towns and districts transferred as he pleased. To have all the territory on the left bank of the Rhine secured to France, Prussia received valuable compensation at the expense of the German empire for the cession of the Duchy of Cleves and other provinces transferred to France. Bavaria and other minor States were benefited in the same way, because Napoleon already meant to use these States against Austria and Russia, as he afterwards did. Every endeavour was made, contrary to the articles of the Peace of Amiens, to shut out the trade of Britain, not only with Franceas he had a right to dobut with Holland, Belgium, and Germany. It was in vain that Britain remonstrated. Buonaparte, through his official organ, the Moniteur, declared that "England should have the Treaty of Amiens, the whole Treaty of Amiens, and nothing but the Treaty of Amiens"; but he interpreted this treaty to give every advantage to France to the exclusion of Britain. Half Europe was closed to British trade. It was a condition of the Treaty of Lunville that the independence of Switzerland should be respected, and this was guaranteed by the Batavian, Cisalpine, and Ligurian Republics, as well as by France and Austria. But Buonaparte had already absorbed all these republics into France, and Austria he set at defiance. He had never withdrawn the French troops from Switzerland, but whilst they remained French emissaries had continued to foment the feuds between the people and the nobles, between one canton and another. He now declared this state of things must end, and he assumed the office of umpire, to settle the affairs of the Swiss for them. He had no right to assume this officeif needed, it belonged to the other Powers of Europe as well as France; but he knew that he had the mightand he used it. At the end of September he sent General Rapp to issue a manifesto announcing that Napoleon was determined to put an end to all their differences. This manifesto was immediately followed by the appearance of General Ney at the head of forty thousand men, in addition to those already in the country. Thus Switzerland was invaded, and its constitution trodden out by an armed occupation. Buonaparte assumed the title of Mediator of the Helvetic League, and dictated his own terms to the deputies of the French party who were sent to Paris.
On the declaration of war, Buonaparte resorted to a proceeding that had never been practised before, and which excited the most violent indignation in England. He ordered the detention of British subjects then in France, as prisoners of war. Talleyrand previously assured some British travellers, who applied to him for information, that they had nothing to fear; that their persons would be safe under the protection of a Government which, unlike that of Britain, observed the laws of nations, and Buonaparte caused his well-known agent, Louis Goldsmith, the editor of a French paper, the Argus, published in London, to insert the same assurance in that journal. Thus thrown off their guard, all the British in France were seized by authority of a proclamation of the 22nd of May. Numbers of these were families and individuals not resident in France, but merely hurrying home from Italy, Switzerland, etc. They numbered some 12,000, and were kept confined till the close of the wars. The pretext was the capture of two ships before war was declared, but they were not captured until the Ambassadors had withdrawn, or until an embargo had been laid by Napoleon on British shipping.While an impulse was thus given to the mathematical theory of light in the University of Cambridge, similar progress was being made in the sister University of Dublin, where three of her most eminent professorsSir William Rowan Hamilton, Dr. Lloyd, and Mr. M'Cullaghdevoted themselves energetically to its improvement and verification. Sir William Hamilton, a geometer of the first order, having undertaken a more complete discussion of the wave surface of Fresnel, to the equation of which he gave a more elegant form, ascertained the exact nature of that surface, and consequently the exact direction of refracted rays in the neighbourhood of the optic axes. The beautiful and unexpected results he obtained were verified by his friend Dr. Lloyd. The names of Sir William R. Hamilton and Dr. Lloyd will be handed down to posterity in connection with this discovery. "But," says Professor Forbes, "they have other claims to our respect. The former has generalised the most complicated cases of common geometrical optics, by a peculiar analysis developed in his essays on 'Systems of Rays.' To Dr. Lloyd we are indebted for several interesting experimental papers on optics, for an impartial review of the progress of the science, and for an excellent elementary treatise on the wave theory."He found the Bedford clan ready, as usual, for office, but wanting to come in a whole legion; the poor weak Duke of Newcastle was equally prepared, shedding tears in his facile way, hugging and kissing people in his trouble, and wondering why his "dear old friend" had thus abandoned him. Pitt passed on, and chose Lord Camden as Lord Chancellor; Northington as President of the Council; Lord Granby as Commander-in-Chief; Shelburne and Conway as Secretaries of State; the Duke of Grafton as First Lord of the Treasury; Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer; with Lord North, James Grenville, brother of Temple, Colonel Barr, and others, in secondary posts. Mr. Stewart Mackenzie, Bute's brother, was restored to his former office, but without any control over Scottish affairs. It was clear that Pitt had selected his colleagues without regard to party, but with an eye to the ability of the respective persons. It was a mode of acting particularly after the fancy of the king, who had always been, according to his own words to Pitt on the occasion, "zealously ready to give his aid towards destroying all party distinctions, and restoring that subordination to government, which can alone preserve that inestimable blessing, liberty, from degenerating into licentiousness." "I venture," said Burke, "to say, it did so happen that persons had a single office divided between them, who had never spoken to each other in their lives, until they found themselves, they knew not how, pigging together, heads and points, in the same truckle bed."
路见不平Eason吼
