Palm, a bookseller of the free city of Naumburg, having published a pamphlet in which the ambition of Napoleon was arraigned, a party of French gens-d’armes passed the frontier, and seized the unsuspecting citizen, exactly as the Duke d’Enghien had been arrested at Ettingen, and Sir George Rumbold at Hamburg, the year before.  The bookseller was tried for a libel against Napoleon, at Braunau, before a French court-martial; found guilty, condemned to death, and shot immediately, in pursuance of his sentence.  It is needless to dwell upon this outrage:  the death of D’Enghien has found advocates or palliators—­this mean murder of a humble tradesman, who neither was nor ever had been a subject either of France or Buonaparte, has been less fortunate.

The Emperor of Russia once more visited Berlin, when the feelings of Prussia, and indeed of all the neighbouring states, were in this fever of excitement.  He again urged Frederick William to take up arms in the common cause, and offered to back him with all the forces of his own great empire.  The English Government, taking advantage of the same crisis, sent Lord Morpeth[55] to Berlin, with offers of pecuniary supplies—­about the acceptance of which, however, the anxiety of Prussia on the subject of Hanover created some difficulty.  Lastly, Buonaparte, well informed of what was passing in Berlin, and desirous, since war must be, to hurry Frederick into the field ere the armies of the Czar could be joined with his, now poured out in the Moniteur such abuse on the persons and characters of the Queen, Prince Louis, and every illustrious patriot throughout Prussia, that the general wrath could no longer be held in check.  Warlike preparations of every kind filled the kingdom during August and September.  On the first of October the Prussian Minister at Paris presented a note to Talleyrand, demanding, among other things, that the formation of a Confederacy in the North of Germany should no longer be thwarted by French interference, and that the French troops within the territories of the Rhenish League should recross the Rhine into France, by the 8th of the same month of October.

But Napoleon was already in person on the German side of the Rhine; and his answer to the Prussian note was a general order to his own troops, in which he called on them to observe in what manner a German sovereign still dared to insult the soldiers of Austerlitz.

The conduct of Prussia, in thus rushing into hostilities, without waiting for the advance of the Russians, was as rash as her holding back from Austria, during the campaign of Austerlitz, had been cowardly.  As if determined to profit by no lesson, the Prussian council also directed their army to advance towards the French, instead of lying on their own frontier—­a repetition of the great leading blunder of the Austrians in the preceding year.  The Prussian army accordingly invaded the Saxon provinces, and the Elector, seeing his country treated as rudely as that of Bavaria had been on a similar occasion by the Austrians, and wanting the means to withdraw his own troops as the Bavarian had succeeded in doing under like provocation, was compelled to accept the alliance which the Cabinet of Berlin urged on him, and to join his troops with those of the power by which he had been thus insulted and wronged.