the eye ranged over the prospect, each feature in succession awakened distinct yet undefinable emotions. Far on the right Oliver's Mount confronted the Castle-cliff on my left; the former naked and sombre; the latter rising precipitately from the pier, receiving the moon-beams aslant on its pale-green declivity; its summit crowned with the ruined tower and grey battlements, — once formidable fortifications, now the wrecks of past-ages, which time has only spared to show his triumphs over men and their works. Below lay the town; but there was little inducement to contemplate its red-tiled roofs and black chimnies, while the tide was glittering in the bay, with innumerable waves, and the ocean stretching beyond, as though it reached to eternity. The firmament was perfectly serene: it was a gala-night in heaven, where the moon in full majesty, enthroned between the planets Jupiter and Saturn, at nearly equal distances, was shining so bright that none but the nobility of the sky, stars of the first and second magnitude, could be seen in her presence. As I stood listening to the swell and fall of waters beneath, contrasting that multitudinous roar with the perpetual silence of the churchyard around me, — the repose of the dead in their graves, with the restlessness of the surges on the beach,—a trumpet from the Castle sounded the evening-call for the soldiery to repair to their quarters. It was the very music for the moment and the scene; clear, shrill, and sonorous, searching through the ear for an echo in the recesses of the heart, and it found one as sweet but more significant there, than the responses that came like voices of invisible beings from the neighbouring hills, at every pause in the strain. I was reminded, and who in such a situation would not have been reminded, of "that day and that hour, whereof no man knoweth," when "the trumpet shall sound, the dead shall be raised, and we shall be changed." I went home in quiet thought. 64 THE VOYAGE OF THE BLIND. INTRODUCTION. After the first fall of Buonaparte, in 1814, Britain entered upon negotiations for peace, covered with glory and surrounded with conquests: she retired from the discussions with her glory doubled by the unextorted surrender of her conquests. But it is lamentable to recollect, that in the noblest act of disinterested justice, (justice having all the grace of generosity,) which her own high character ever called upon her to perform, — a concession was made on her behalf, by the plenipotentiary intrusted with her honour, which she utterly and abhorrently disavowed as soon as it was known. The decree, however, had gone forth, and the act was irrevocable: it need scarcely be added that the consequences have been as frightful as it was immediately foretold that they would be, by the philanthropists, who had recently effected the abolition of the negro slave-trade in this country. The definitive treaty, at that time concluded, contained the following article: "His most Christian Majesty, concurring without reserve in the sentiments of his Britannic Majesty, with respect to a description of traffic repugnant to the principles of natural justice, and of the enlightened age in which we live, engages to unite all his efforts to those of his Britannic Majesty, at the approaching congress, to induce all the powers of Christendom to decree the abolition of the slave-trade, so that the said trade shall cease universally as it shall cease definitively, under any circumstances, on the part of the French government, in the course of five years; and that during the said period no slave-merchant shall import or sell slaves, except in the colonies of the state to which he is a subject." This article acknowledged the iniquity of the slave-trade; and yet authorized its practice by the French government for five years. Innumerable have been the instances of injustice sanctioned by treaties of peace; but surely this was the first time that injustice had been avowed and yet sanctioned. In the cabalistic jargon of diplomatists, the most flagrant usurpations of predominant villainy are wont to be coloured with pretences of forbearance; and the most reluctant concessions of humbled impotence are declared voluntary acts of independent power. It is an established homage which vice pays to virtue, in courts and cabinets (as well as elsewhere), to assume her character, and do every thing in her name: in this case, however, she violated her own etiquette, and, confessing her infamy, stipulated for an indulgence to riot in a crime so multiform, that no single term in human language comprehends the hundredth part of its atrocity, — the slave-trade alone can do this: the licences, granted by the police of Paris to harlots to carry on their profession unmolested, are venial in comparison with the turpitude of the licence in question, demanded by France, and granted by the ambassador of Britain, to carry on,— no, to commit the slave-trade; for to commit the slave-trade is to commit fraud, violence, perjury, sacrilege, robbery, murder, treason, and every sin that is involved with, or incidental to the traffic in the bones and muscles of living men. As a deliberate recognition of wickedness in the principle of an article in a public treaty, between two nations professing Christianity, had thus far been unexampled in past ages, it is devoutly to be hoped, that this profligate precedent will never be copied in ages to come; but that whatever wrong monarchs may be disposed to attempt, or diplomatists to confirm, all may be done as heretofore, under the decent cloak of honesty; for the very affectation of virtue is a restraint upon vice, while enough of disposition will inevitably appear to betray her hypocrisy. But the African slave-trade by France was not the continuance of a system already established, as in the case of Spain and Portugal, — it was the creation of a new slave-trade. France had not, at the time, a foot of ground on the habitable globe to be cultivated by the toil and blood |