nothing else, than that we should be indebted to him for our welfare.  Whenever he gives us a sovereign to reign over us in the person of his magnanimous brother Joseph, he will consummate our prosperity.—­As he has been pleased to change our old system of laws, it becomes us to obey, and to live in tranquillity:  as he has also promised to re-organize our financial system, we may hope that then our naval and military power will become terrible to our enemies, &c.’—­That the Castilians were horror-stricken by the above blasphemies, which are the habitual language of the French Senate and Ministers to their Emperor, is apparent from an address dated Valladolid,—­’He (Bonaparte) carries his audacity the length of holding out to us offers of happiness and peace, while he is laying waste our country, pulling down our churches, and slaughtering our brethren.  His pride, cherished by a band of villains who are constantly anxious to offer incense on his shrine, and tolerated by numberless victims who pine in his chains, has caused him to conceive the fantastical idea of proclaiming himself Lord and Ruler of the whole world.  There is no atrocity which he does not commit to attain that end....  Shall these outrages, these iniquities, remain unpunished while Spaniards—­and Castilian Spaniards—­yet exist?’

Many passages might be adduced to prove that carnage and devastation spread over their land have not afflicted this noble people so deeply as this more searching warfare against the conscience and the reason.  They groan less over the blood which has been shed, than over the arrogant assumptions of beneficence made by him from whose order that blood has flowed.  Still to be talking of bestowing and conferring, and to be happy in the sight of nothing but what he thinks he has bestowed or conferred, this, in a man to whom the weakness of his fellows has given great power, is a madness of pride more hideous than cruelty itself.  We have heard of Attila and Tamerlane who called themselves the scourges of God, and rejoiced in personating the terrors of Providence; but such monsters do less outrage to the reason than he who arrogates to himself the gentle and gracious attributes of the Deity:  for the one acts professedly from the temperance of reason, the other avowedly in the gusts of passion.  Through the terrors of the Supreme Ruler of things, as set forth by works of destruction and ruin, we see but darkly; we may reverence the chastisement, may fear it with awe, but it is not natural to incline towards it in love:  moreover, devastation passes away—­a perishing power among things that perish:  whereas to found, and to build, to create and to institute, to bless through blessing, this has to do with objects where we trust we can see clearly,—­it reminds us of what we love,—­it aims at permanence,—­and the sorrow is, (as in the present instance the people of Spain feel) that it may last; that, if the giddy and intoxicated Being who proclaims that he does these