ceeded, by one of the most dexterous schemes ever devised. Having great influence over the Custom® house Officers and Board of Management in the prin cipal trading Firms on the Continent, which dealt with the house of John Bull and Co. he procured a heavy duty of 40 per cent. to be laid on all goods where his influence extended, pretending that the produce would be of much use to the State; that it would destroy the trade of J. Bull and Co. and encourage the ingenuity of his and their own people. The consequence of this measure was precisely what he had anticipated. The owners of these goods were unable to pay the immense tax laid upon them, and they were immedi ately seized for the benefit of Napoleon's new Shop, and lodged for sale in his warehouses. By these cheap means furnished with goods, having swindled the poor merchants out of their wares, and the public out of the duties, he hopes no doubt to undersell his rival, and pocket all the enormous profits. In pursuance of his plan, we now hear the trade carried on by this mighty Pedlar at all the wakes, fairs, and marts, upon the Continent. He sells tea, sugar, and all kinds of groceries, wholesale and retail-but net for Exportation, as he has not yet succeeded in the Shipping company way. When his present stock fails, he has found out a method of serving his customers with the best refined sugar made from beet-root-with hyson of broom-leaves-with coffee from horse-beans-with Jesuit's bark of burnt feathers--and best English broadcloth from fustian! In fine, he has as many substitutes as an apothecary, and declares (upon his credit as an honest tradesman), that they are all as good, or rather better, than the original articles, as in times past manufactured and sold by Bull and Co.!!

It is most wonderful how ingenuity, being once set agoing, stops at nothing. Not satisfied with these improvements in the direct line of his business, we

D 5

have

have heard that one of his Clerks, not long ago, invented a mode of blowing up rocks with lightning, to save gunpowder, which is scarce; and we are assured that it gives the stone a fine polish, and splits it as accurately as if done by wedge and saw, like our clumsy British marble-merchants. The only defect attendant on the invention is, that a good storm is not always to be had; but, however, this deficiency is made up by working double tides when the weather is favourably unfavourable, and excellently bad! Yet with all these improvements, and notwithstanding his puffs in the papers, it is asserted, by men of judgment and veracity, that he does very little real business, and what he does do is chiefly, if not altogether, by commission: for what success, say they, could a man expect in trade, who is, according to report, utterly deficient in arithmetical knowledge?

We have the authority of his Wives for saying that he is acquainted with Multiplication. Fellowship he is utterly a stranger to; and knows nothing of settling Partnership accounts. On the other hand, however, it must be confessed, that he is master of Addition (vide bulletins); of Subtraction (vide all the States of Europe); of Division (vide ditto, and particularly Spain and Portugal); of Practice (vide his life); and of Fractions (vide Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Asperne, and the whole world).In other respects, though his assurance is great, little faith can be put in his assurances. Though a great figure at the head of a line, he is, in the management of domestic affairs, little better than a cipher; and though. he has hitherto been able to enforce payments.to him of debts and demands in money, it is now probable that he will be compelled to receive a great many checks in which case it will not be possible for him to support his credit much longer,

We have a vulgar saying, when a person combines

the

BUONAPARTE BECOME SHOPKEEPER.

59

the accomplishment of two objects in one actión, that he kills two birds with o one stone;" and in this science it is that Buonaparte appears to be peculiarly dexterous. At first, being a military man, he had only soldiers under his command; and, when he turned Shopkeeper, he must have been somewhat in difficulty for proper persons to employ in his service in the new line, as soldiers are not easily converted into retail hucksters. But even this has been done by a curious amalgamation; and we now see, in the service of Napoleon, creatures of the most wonderful anomaly, and a villanous e mpound between War. and Trade. War is their trade, and their trade is a war. He has his armies of custom-house officers, buccaneering for wealth and plunder; his mercantile agents and Douaniers are trading armies, seeking the same ends by means with only a shade of difference. The inkhorn is suspended from the same belt from which hangs the cartouche box; the pistol and the pen' are slung together. We have cordons of troops, and cordons of Douaniers; posts military and commercial; seizures by the soldiery, and seizures by the civil power; contribution and confiscation; bankruptcy and bayonets tend to the same object; and decrees or regulations, and general or regimental orders, are, in point of effect, absolutely similar. A commission in the coast army is, in fact, a license to trade; and a license to trade is a military commission in every place of commerce.

What with agents of the one description, and agents of the other, this new Shopkeeper has contrived to get all the Colonial Produce of the Continent into his own hands. He will sell it for his own emolument, and invent new stratagems to obtain more goods under false pretences. Thus this Swindler thinks to rival the fair trade of Britain; but surely the wisdom of our forefathers shall not now be discovers

on

to be folly, and the present generation be doomed to see it proved, that honesty is not the best policy.— No! we shall not be condemned to witness roguery completely and ultimately successful, though practised the highest scale. Even though the great Emperor be turned a swindler, a smuggler, a monopolist, a forestaller, and a regrater, he shall not succeed in his nefarious practices. Tardy Justice will at length overtake him; and the crimes that would draw destruction on a lowly head, shall not escape vengeance on the Crown of a Sovereign!

This new occupation of Buonaparte must, after all, form a singular contrast with that occupation which is gone-Trade! trade! his whole soul is now bent on trade! and we no longer hear of the warlike Chief leading his armies to glory and to victory. The laurels of Buzaco and of Talavera are left for other minions of Fortune to reap, while her higher favourite has converted the saddle of the war-horse into a covering for his writing-stool-his tent into a counting-roomhis columns of troops into columns of figures-his sword into a grey-goose quill-his Marshal's truncheon into a convenient rule, with which and with his iron stile he draws the lines in his book instead of lines in the field, and may thence be said still to rule with a rod of iron!

No longer does he peruse with anxiety the returns of the slain and the list of the wounded: his cares are centred in the returns of the market-prices, and the lists of bankruptcies, dividends, and supersedeasesHe does not inquire the number of prisoners taken, and the prisons where confined; but the number of seizures and the depôts-Conscription has given way to confiscation-He who should have been studious to learn how Lord Wellington contrived to smuggle Portuguese troops in English uniforms into the battle of Buzaco, is employed in sorting pepper and all-spice,

and

THE DOWNFALL OP MINISTERS.

and making new tariffs, when he ought to be practising ture and tret at the head of his army. No, thought is now engaged on the transportation of artillery and ammunition-the cartage of tea and sugar is a more agreeable speculation: the trade in human, flesh and blood has been superseded by the trade in treacle and molasses; and the highest ambition of the Conqueror seems to be, to become the Carrier of Europe!

THE DOWNFALL OF MINISTERS.

[From the same, Nov. 5.]

When beggars die, there are no comets seen.

SHAKSPEARE.-Hem!

IN all ages of the world the human race have put.

more or less faith in omens; and though, in our times-times, it may be asserted, of presumption and scepticism we do not go to the same extent of belief in portents and prognostications that the ancients did, who divined by the flight of crows, and augured from the guts of calves; yet, on a reference to that most authentic source of prediction, Moore's Almanack, and an attentive examination of the mysteries of fortune-telling, as practised by itinerant gypsies in the country, and settled conjurors in the metropolis, `we must be ready to confess, that the Fates do, even to this day, sometimes give little hints and intimations beforehand of what they are about.-Many of these indications of what is to come to pass doubtless escape our observation; as it is not upon every occasion that Scotsmen and Edinburgh Reviewers (who are the only mortals acknowledged to be legitimately possessed of the second sight) are inclined to exercise their faculties, and enlighten the darkling world. But some are so very obvious, that every man who runs may read, and they require merely to be noticed to be understood.

Ο