their approaches, however, with incredible ardour; and effected, at last, a lodgment in the covered way, after an obstinate dispute, in which they lost two thousand of their best troops. But they were dislodged the next day, by the gallantry of the garrison, which acquired fresh courage from this success.

Such was the doubtful and even unfavourable state of the siege of Maestricht, when intelligence arrived of the signing of the preliminaries, and orders for a cessation of arms. Yet was it agreed by the plenipotentiaries, "That, for the glory of the arms of his most christian "majesty," the place should be immediately surrendered to his general, but restored on the conclusion of the peace, with all its magazines and artillery. A. D. 1748. Mareschal Saxe accordingly took possession MAY 3. of Maestricht, while the garrison marched out with the customary honours of war.

But although the negociation was thus far advanced in the beginning of summer, so many were the difficulties started by the plenipotentiaries of the different powers, that it was the month of October before matters could be finally settled. Meanwhile hostilities were carried on both in the East and West-Indies; but no memorable event took place. Admiral Boscawen failed in an attempt to reduce the French settlement of Pondicherry, on the coast of Coromandel; and admiral Knowles, in an attack

upon St. Jago de Cuba. Knowles, however, took port

Lewis, on the south side of Hispaniola, and demolished the fortifications13. He also defeated, off the Havanna, a Spanish squadron of equal force with his own,

ост.

and took one ship of the line. At length the OCT. 7.

definitive treaty was signed, and hostilities ceased in all quarters.

This treaty had for its basis a general confirmation of all preceding treaties, from that of Westphalia downward; and for its immediate object, as the means of a general

VOL. V.

13. Contin. of Rapin, vol. ix.
Dd

pacification,

pacificatoin, a mutual restitution of all conquests made since the beginning of the war, with a release of prisoners without ransom. The principal stipulations provide, that the duchies of Parma, Placentia, Guastalla, shall be ceded, as a sovereignty, to the infant Don Philip, and the Heirs male of his body; (but it was also stipulated, that, in case he or his descendants shall succeed to the crown of Spain, or that of the two Sicilies, or die without male issue, those territories shall return to the present -possessors, the empress-queen of Hungary and the king of Sardinia, or their descendants;) that the subjects of his Britannic majesty shall enjoy the assiento contract, with the privilege of the annual ship, during the reversionary term of four years, which it has been suspended by the war; (but no mention was made of the right of English ships to navigate the American seas without being subject to search, though the indignation occasioned by the violation of that contested right, had solely given rise to the war between Great-Britain and Spain:) that all the contracting powers shall guarantee to his Prussian majesty the duchy of Silesia and the county of Glatz, as he now possesses them: and that such of the same powers as have guaranteed the pragmatic sanction of the emperor Charles VI. for securing to his daughter, the present empress-queen of Hungary and Bohemia, the undivided succession of the house of Austria, shall renew their engagements in the most solemn manner, with the exception of the cessions made by this and former treaties14.

Such was the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which has been so generally, and so unjustly censured by English writers, who ought rather to have censured the wanton war, and the wasteful and unskilful manner of conducting it. The peace was as good as the confederates had any right to expect. They had been, upon the whole, exceedingly unfortunate. They had never hazarded a battle, in the Netherlands, without sustaining a defeat; and there was

14. Articles of Peace, ibid.

no

no prospect of their being more successful, had they even been reinforced by the thirty thousand Russians hired, while the same generals commanded on both sides. But matters were so ill managed, that the Russians could not have joined them till the season of action would have been nearly over; and had they been ready more early, it is believed that the king of Prussia would have interposed, from a jealousy of the aggrandisement of the house of Austria, on whose embarrassments he depended for the quiet possession of his conquests. The resources of France were indeed nearly exhausted:-her navy was destroyed: and Lewis XV. made sacrifices proportioned to his necessities. But great as his necessities were, he could have continued the war another year; and the progress of his arms during one campaign, it was feared, might awe the Dutch into submission. A confederacy,

always ill combined, would have been broken to pieces; and the hostile powers, left separately at the mercy of the house of Bourbon, must have acceded to worse conditions; or England must have hired new armies of mercenaris, to continue a ruinous continental war, in which she had properly no interest.

But although the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, all circumstances considered, cannot be deemed unfavourable to the confederates, or by any means an ill-timed measure, it must be lamented, that it was the necessary consequence of such a long and fruitless war-of a war, singular in the annals of mankind; by which, after a prodigious destruction of the human species, and a variety of turns of fortune, all parties, the king of Prussia excepted, whose selfish and temporising policy it is impossible to justify, may be said to have been losers 15,

This

15. The settlement, procured for Don Philip in Italy, might have been obtained on the death of the emperor Charles VI. if the house of Bourbon had confined its views merely to that object; and admitting that it could not, it was a very inadequate equivalent for the expenses and losses of the two branches of that house, by land and sea, during the course of the

This reflection more particularly strikes us, in contemplating the infatuation of France and Great-Britain: of the former, in lavishing such a quantity of blood and treasure, in order to give an emperor to Germany; and of the latter, in neglecting her most essential interests, in withdrawing her attention from Spanish America, and loading her subjects with an immense public debt, in order to preserve entire the succession of the house of Austria! but more especially the folly of both in continuing the war, for several years, after the object of it was lost on one side, and attained on the other. Nor can we, as Englishmen, in taking such a survey, help looking back, without peculiar regret, to the peaceful administration of sir Robert Walpole; when the commerce and manufactures of GreatBritain flourished to so high a degree, that the balance of trade in her favour amounted, on an average, to the immense sum of four millions sterling annually.

Let us not, however, my dear Philip, dwell wholly on the dark side of the picture. So great an influx of wealth, without any extraordinary expenditure, or call to bold enterprise, must soon have produced a total dissolution of manners; and the British nation, overwhelmed with luxury and effeminacy, might have sunk into early decline. The martial spirit, which seemed to languish for want of exercise, was revived by the war. The English navy, which had been suffered to go to decay, was restored, and that of France ruined. This last advantage was, in itself, worth many millions of treasure: and it was eventually productive of a multitude of beneficial consequences. A desire of re-establishing their marine was one of the chief motives that induced the French ministry to grant such

the war. The king of Sardinia, after all his subsidies, and some cessions made to him, was a loser; and the queen of Hungary could have dictated better conditions in 1742, when the French were driven out of Bohemia, than she at last acceded to. Even the king of Prussia obtained no more than was ceded to him by the treaty of Breslaw, concluded the same year. 16. Chalmer's Estimate, p. 37.

favourable

favourable conditions to the confederates at Aix-laChapelle; they having already formed the design, as will afterward more fully appear, of extending their settlements both in America and the East-Indies.

LETTER XXXI.

FRANCE, SPAIN, AND GREAT-BRITAIN, FROM THE PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE, TO THE RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES IN 1755, WITH A GENERAL VIEW OF THE DISPUTES IN THE EAST-INDIES, AND A PARTICULAR ACCOUNT OF THE RISE

OF THE WAR IN AMERICA.

THE few years of peace, that followed the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, were the most prosperous and happy that Europe had ever known. Arts and letters were successfully cultivated; manufactures and commerce flourished: society was highly polished; and the intercourse of mankind, of nations and of ranks, was rendered more facile and general than in any former period, by means of new roads, new vehicles, and new amusements. This was more especially the case in France and England, and between the people of the two rival kingdoms; who, forgetting past animosities, seemed only to contend for pre-eminence in gaiety, refinement, and mutual civilities.

That harmony, however, was disturbed for a time, by alarming tumults in England, and by a violent dispute between the clergy and the parliaments of France, which threatened a rebellion in the two kingdoms. But both subsided without any important or lasting consequence. The first were the effects of the wantonness of the common people of England, rioting in opulence and plenty, and not sufficiently restrained by a regular police: the second, the indication of a rising spirit of liberty among the more enlightened part of the French laity; as I shall have

occasion