of autumn;" or I view them, with another great poet, as the waves of the sea, chasing each other down in succession, and lost for ever! In this delightful season thoughts of this kind crowd upon me. The summer is passing:-how few are our summers when the whole are numbered! how rapid is the flight of time! how serious the thought that it flies the swifter, the longer it flies! I do not often give expression to feelings of this nature, nor am I quite sure that it is often safe or proper. But to such reflections you are not, I believe, a stranger; and the state of my family for some months past has, perhaps, made them more familiar with me than usual. I have seen one virtuous and feeling heart set to rest, as all our hearts shall be when a few are over. * "Sigh not ye winds as passing o'er The chambers of the dead ye fly: years Adieu, my dear madam: if this letter be not a proof of my wisdom, let it, however, be an evidence of my confidence in you; and let it also convey to you the assurances of my grateful and affectionate respect. JAMES CURRIE. * One of his sisters had recently died under his roof, after a lingering illness. Ed. LETTERS TO T. CREEVEY, ESQ., M.P. LONDON, IN 1802 AND 1803. Nos. 98. To 103. Reflections during the short Peace with France. . Mr. Fox. Declaration of War. with Lord Whitworth. Ireland. Buonaparte's conference Maritime Code as to right of Search. 357 No. 98. Liverpool, November 16. 1802. MY DEAR CREEVEY, Accept a thousand thanks for your long letter, and be assured I do not flatter you when I call you the prince of correspondents. What a strange situation is the world got into! This France puzzles me in the extreme.-One thing I foresee, we may not have actual war for a year or two, but we shall not have any thing like settled peace; and in the end, we must buckle to the hardest contest that we have ever yet endured. It would be madness for us to go to war at present, especially on any point yielded by the treaty of Amiens. To resist that treaty would be to begin with a breach of faith, which would rouse France against us, and the Continent also, -the very thing Buonaparte wants. Then again, our fleet is dismantled, they say, and our seamen are scattered: it would require eighteen months to get it into its former formid able state, perhaps more. Then, there appears a brilliant thing for us to do; that is, to block up the harbours of France, and to make the enraged consul grin within his own domain. Such a measure would, in the end, produce the ruin of the French colonies, which are yet too unsettled to support themselves without direct and constant intercourse with France. Without such intercourse, they would wither and fall off: for France cannot again render them impregnable by the emancipation of the negroes, the negroes whom they have abused, betrayed, and murdered. But here comes the back-game of this devil of a consul. He would attempt to carry on the trade of France under neutral flags, under Russian, American, Danish, and Swedish. We should resist, and take the ships of these nations, or our blockade is not worth a farthing. Then he makes common cause with them, and involves us in all the unsettled and difficult and dangerous questions respecting neutral bottoms; holds us out as the tyrants of the sea, and contrives to get us shut out of the ports of the continent. And all this he will do with vastly more ease, if, as I said before, we begin a war with a breach of faith. Then come new taxes, -perhaps the odious income tax, the people dissatis |