severe experiment whether by applying the actual cautery to his back by means of glowing iron, the activity of the nervous system might not be restored. He was so far from being cast down by the torture of this medical martyrdom, that he asked a friend who entered the apartment after he had undergone it, whether he did not smell the roasted meat. The same heroic spirit marked his expressions, that "he would be perfectly contented to lose the use of his limbs, if he could but retain the power of working constantly by the help of an amanuensis." Hoffman died at Berlin, upon the 25th June, 1822, leaving the reputation of a remarkable man, whose temperament and health alone prevented his arriving at a great height of reputation, and whose works as they now exist ought to be considered less as models for imitation than as affording a warning how the most fertile fancy may be exhausted by the lavish prodigality of its possessor.

ART. III.-Précis des Evénemens Militaires, ou Essais Historiques sur les Campagnes de 1799 à 1814. Par M. le Comte Mathieu Dumas. Avec Cartes et Plans. Tomes I. et II. Campagne de 1799. Seconde edition. Paris. 1817.

THE reputation of M. le Comte Mathieu Dumas stands so deservedly high among his own countrymen, that few of our readers can, we presume, be entirely unacquainted with his history. A native of Montpellier, he entered, at the early age of fifteen, into the military profession, as a sub-lieutenant in the regiment of Medoc; and he served, as a captain, in Rochambeau's corps, during the American war of independence. In the year 1782, he attained to the rank of major, and on returning to France he was employed in a number of important missions, of which our limits will not permit us to notice more than the following. He was appointed, in 1784, to make a military survey of the shores of Ionia, of the Archipelago, and the islands of the Levant; and he was officially present three years afterwards at Amsterdam, when that city sustained a siege by the Prussians. In 1788, he held a responsible staff situation in Upper Alsace, Guienne and Languedoc; the year following, he acted as aide-decamp to General Broglie, at the commencement of the troubles in Paris, and when the Bastile fell, became aide-de-camp to M.

de la Fayette, then commander of the national guard. In 1790, M. Dumas was appointed director of the war department. As such he headed the national guards which were called together from the provinces on the rumour of the king's projected flight, and conducted that unfortunate prince into Paris. Soon after this, he attained the rank of major-general; was appointed second in command in the third military division, and organized, at Metz, the first troop of horse artillery which ever existed in France. The same year he sat in the national assembly as deputy for the department of Seine-et-Oise. He there defended the cause of the emigrants, resisted with all his might the rash measures proposed to be taken against them, and did his best to prevent the declaration of war with Austria, which was then in agitation. M. Dumas was, even in those troubled times, a moderate man. A lover of liberty, he yet knew how to distinguish between genuine freedom and absolute anarchy, and he condemned every arbitrary proceeding, no matter whether it might emanate from a prince or a demagogue. When Dumouriez, for example, drove the Count de Rochambeau into exile, M. Dumas had the courage to declare openly in the assembly, that not all the intrigues and artifices of the factious could strip that great man of the civic crown which he had earned. His conduct after the transactions of the 20th of June, was in perfect keeping with the character which he had hitherto maintained. He spoke out boldly against them; and when Belgium was invaded by the French armies, he scrupled not to impeach the ministers Rolland, Clavière, and Dumouriez, as the instigators of that act of aggression. His behaviour in short, was such, that he soon became an object of hatred and suspicion to the lawless faction which tyrannized over France, and, being proscribed, he retired to England, from which he did not return till after the death of the King, in 1793.

In this manner M. Dumas continued to employ himself, till the eventful 4th of September, 1796, (18 Fructidor,) drove him a second time into exile. He then fled to Hamburgh, where, till the return of Buonaparte from Egypt, and the counter-revolution of 9th November, 1799, he lived wholly in retirement. Called again, by these changes, into active life, he played a distinguished part in the great scenes which followed, and served both at home and abroad, as a soldier and a statesman, with honour to himself, and benefit to his country. Among other and more important arrangements of which he was the author, it is not unworthy of remark, that to him the French army was indebted for the institution of the legion of honour; it was founded, at his

suggestion, in the year 1802, when he filled the office of councillor of state; and in 1805, he was himself nominated to a distinguished rank in it, at the same time that he was appointed general of division.

M. Dumas discharged the functions of minister at war, grandmarshal of the Palace, and grand dignitary of the order of the Two Sicilies, under Joseph Buonaparte, when that personage sat upon the throne of Naples. Attached soon afterwards to the army of Italy, he accompanied it in the junction which it formed with the Grand Army, in the year 1809; he was present at the passage of the Danube, 4th July of that year, and at the battle of Wagram fought on the 5th and 6th; and being charged with the execution of the terms of the armistice, signed at Znaim on the 12th, he was decorated with the grand cross of the order of military merit.

. M. Dumas was intendant general of the French army, during the fatal expedition into Russia, and went through the whole of that memorable campaign unhurt; but he was less fortunate in the campaign which followed, for at the battle of Leipsic he was made prisoner, and did not return to France till after the restoration. During 1814, he seems to have held office, and accepted rank under the Bourbons; he was created commander of the order of St. Louis, and grand cross of the legion of honour;-but these he laid aside, as soon as Napoleon reappeared from Elba, and assumed once more the distinctions which the Emperor had conferred upon him. In 1816 he retired from the army with a pension, after forty-five years active service, and twenty-three campaigns. In 1818 he was appointed a member of the commission for the defence of the kingdom, and he was classed in the extraordinary service of the council of state. In 1819 he entered into the ordinary service of that council, and was nominated president of the War Committee. He was entrusted with the defence of several of the projets de loi, presented by the government to the Chamber of Deputies. He appears to have now retired altogether from public life, with the title of Honorary Councillor of State.

It may not be amiss if we add here, that the first part of the Précis des Evénemens Militaires, was begun at Hamburgh during the author's compulsory residence in that city, and originally published in monthly numbers in 1800. He did not resume it until 1816, when he published the second part, containing the campaign of 1800; and in 1817 a new edition of the first part. The work has since been continued by the publication, in detached portions, of the subsequent campaigns from 1801 up to

1807, and will, if the author lives to complete it, form a connected series of annals of all the great transactions which have occurred from 1799 up to 1814.

The first portion of these valuable memoirs, of which alone we can venture to take notice in our present number, contains a clear, and upon the whole an extremely impartial relation of the military transactions of 1799; in other words, a general outline of the military history of Europe, from the breaking up of the congress of Rastadt, down to the memorable revolution of the 18th of Brumaire. It is hardly necessary for us to state, that few periods of a similar extent, between the commencement of the disturbances in 1789, and their consummation in 1815, were replete with so many, and such deeply interesting events, as this. The campaigns of Kray, Suwarrow, and Bellegarde, in Italy, of the Archduke Charles upon the Rhine, of the Duke of York in North Holland, and of Napoleon Buonaparte in Egypt, were all crowded within the compass of that single year; and they are all detailed in the volumes now before us, with a degree of liveliness and accuracy rarely to be met with in any work of the kind. That the reader may be the better able to follow the outline which we propose to give, as well as to relish those extracts, by means of which, we intend to bring him acquainted with the style and manner of our author, we deem it right to lay before him, by way of preface, a brief sketch of the relative situations and designs of the several powers, at the period immediately preceding that in which M. Dumas has seen fit to commence his labours.

It must be in the recollection of all to whom the history of the last half century is familiar, that a variety of unexpected events -the secession of Prussia from the coalition, the hostility of Spain, and Holland, but above all, the extraordinary success of the French arms during the campaigns of 1796 and 1797,-compelled the Emperor of Austria to detach himself from the connexion which he had formed with England, and to enter into a separate treaty with France. The treaty in question was signed on the seventeenth of October, 1797, at Campo Formio, a village in the vicinity of Udina, by Buonaparte, as representative of the French Republic, and by the Marquis de Gallo, Count Coblentz, Count Demaenfredt, and Baron Dagelman, the Imperial plenipotentiaries. Among other, and more secret clauses, it contained terms by which the Emperor ceded in full sovereignty to the French Republic, the whole of the Austrian Netherlands, and consented that she should remain mistress of Corfu, Zante, Cephalonia, all the other islands, hitherto Venetian, in the Adriatic, and all the Venetian settlements in Albania, situated to

the south-east of the gulph of Lodrino. He agreed to acknowledge the republic newly constituted under the name of Cisalpine, as an independent state, yielding up to it the sovereignty of the countries which had belonged to Austria in Lombardy; and he consented that there should be added to it the cities and territories of Bergamo, Brescia, &c. formerly in the dependence of Venice, as well as the duchies of Mantua and Modena, the principalities of Massa, and Carrara, and the cities and territories of Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna, lately under the authority of the Pope. In return for these advantages, France made over to the crown of Austria, Istria, Dalmatia, all the Venetian islands in the Adriatic, which lay to the north-west of the gulph of Lodrino, and the city of Venice itself, with a large portion of its dominions, situated for the most part between the Tyrol, the lake of Guarda, and the Adriatic. But the stipulation with which we are at present most deeply concerned was that which appointed that a congress should be held at Rastadt, to consist of plenipotentiaries from the French Republic on the one hand, and from the Empire, or Germanic body, on the other; by whom all such difficulties as might still appear to stand in the way of a general and permanent pacification should be adjusted and removed.

The treaty of Campo Formio proved to be, what the very basis upon which it was founded led all reflecting persons to expect, nothing more than an armed truce; during which the opposite parties were less animated by the hope or the desire of a permanent peace, than the anxiety of being as speedily as possible in a condition to renew the war. It was a measure dictated on both sides by imperative necessity; for the preliminaries of Leoben were signed at a moment pregnant with danger, not only to the house of Austria, but to the victorious French army. In proportion, however, as that moment of danger was removed, and thrown into the back ground of the picture of Europe, the rival powers began to recover their habitual views and passions. All that was pacific in the past appeared as a dream; -a preternatural interruption of the great affairs and interests of nations. The French Directory, in utter disregard of existing arrangements, manifested a determined disposition to extend by all means, and in every direction, their principles and their conquests; the court of Vienna could not behold without a pang, Italy, Switzerland and Savoy a prey to French domination, and the Austrian dominions deprived of those boundaries and natural barriers, which their geographical situation had hitherto cast around them. Under these circumstances it can be no matter of