tered the territories of Genoa, and appeared before the capital at the head of forty thousand men. As the inhabitants obstinately refused to lay down their arms, and even treated with derision the proposal of submitting to the clemency of the court of Vienna, the place was regularly invested; and although the Genoese and the French behaved with great spirit in several sallies, the Austrian general conducted his operations with so much skill, vigour, and intrepidity, that he must at last have accomplished his enterprise, had not his attention been diverted to another quarter. Alarmed at the progress of Belleisle, the king of Sardinia, and count Brown represented to Schuylemberg the necessity of raising the siege of Genoa, in order to cover Piedmont and Lombardy. He therefore drew off his army, and joined his Sardinian majesty, to the great joy of the Genoese; who, in revenge of the injuries they had suffered, ravaged the dutchies of Parma and Placentia 1.

The apprehensions of the king of Sardinia for his hereditary dominions were by no means groundless. While the maréchal de Belleisle lay at Ventimiglia, his brother, the chevalier, attempted to penetrate into Piedmont, by the way of Dauphiné, at the head of thirty thousand French and Spaniards, emulous of glory under so gallant a leader. When he arrived at the pass of Exilles, a strong post on the north side of the Doria, he found fourteen battalions of Piedmontese and Austrians waiting for him, behind ramparts of wood and stone, lined with artillery and all the passes of the Alps were secured by detachments of the same troops. Not discouraged by these obstacles, the chevalier attacked the Piedmontese entrenchments with great intrepidity. But he was repulsed with loss in three successive assaults; and being determined to perish rather than survive a miscarriage, he seized a pair of colours, and advancing at the head of his troops, through an incessant fire, planted them with his own hand on the enemy's battlements'. At that instant he fell dead, having receiving the thrust of a bayonet and two musquet-balls in his body. Some other officers of distinction were killed, and the survivors, discouraged by the loss of their brave commander, retired with precipitation, leaving behind them above four thousand slain.

The maréchal de Belleisle was no sooner informed of his

1 Mém. de Noailles, tome iv.-Contin. of Rapin, vol. ix.

2 Voltaire represents him as attempting to pull up the palisades with his teeth, after being wounded in both arms. This is a perfectly ludicrous image, and, even if we admit the assumed fact to be true, utterly inconsistent with the dignity of history. But it is by no means uncommon, even with the best French writers, to excite laughter, when they attempt the sublime.

brother's fate, than he retreated toward the Var to join the unfortunate army from Exilles. About the same time, the king of Sardinia, having assembled an army of seventy thousand men, threatened Dauphiné with an invasion. But excessive rains prevented the execution of the enterprise; and the campaign was closed without any other memorable event.

The naval transactions of this year were more favourable to Great Britain than those of any other during the war. Her success was great almost beyond example, but more advantageous than glorious, as she had a manifest superiority of force in every engagement. The English fleet under the admirals Anson and Warren, consisting of eleven sail of the line, three ships of fifty, and one of forty guns, fell in with a French fleet of six sail of the line, in the beginning of May, off Cape Finisterre. The French fleet was commanded by M. de la Jonquiere and St. George, who had under their convoy thirty ships laden with stores and merchandise, bound for America and the East Indies. The battle began about four in the afternoon; and although the French seamen and commanders behaved with extraordinary courage, and discovered no want of conduct, six ships of war and four armed Indiamen were taken. About seven weeks after this engagement, and nearly in the same latitude, commodore Fox fell in with a fleet from St. Domingo, laden with the rich productions of that fertile island; and forty-six vessels became prizes to the English.

Admiral Hawke was no less successful. He sailed from Plymouth in the summer, with fourteen ships of the line, to intercept a fleet of French merchantmen bound for the West Indies. He cruised for some time off the coast of Bretagne ; and at last the French fleet sailed from the isle of Aix, under convoy of nine ships of the line, besides frigates, commanded by Letendeur. On the 14th of October, the two squadrons came within sight of each other, about seven in the morning, in the latitude of Belleisle. By noon both were engaged. The battle lasted till night, when six French ships of the line had struck to the British flag'. The rest escaped under cover of the darkness; having all maintained, with great obstinacy, a gallant but unequal fight.

These naval victories, and the sailing of admiral Boscawen, with a strong squadron and a considerable body of land forces, for the East Indies, where it was conjectured he would not only

1 London Gazette, Oct. 26, 1747.

recover Madras, but reduce Pondicherry, disposed Louis seriously to think of peace, and even to listen to moderate terms, notwithstanding the great superiority of his arms in the Low Countries. Other causes conspired to the same effect. His finances were almost exhausted; the French trade was alarmingly injured; and he could no longer depend upon supplies from the mines of Mexico and Peru, in the present low state of the French and Spanish navy. The success of his arms in Italy had fallen infinitely short of his expectation; and the republic of Genoa, though a necessary, was become an expensive ally. His views had been totally defeated in Germany, by the elevation of the grand duke to the Imperial throne, and the subsequent pacification between the houses of Austria, Bavaria, and Brandenburg. He was still victorious in the Netherlands: but the election of stadt-holder, by uniting the force of the states-general against him, left little hope of future conquests in that quarter; especially as the British parliament, whose resources were yet copious, and whose liberality seemed to know no bounds, had enabled their sovereign to conclude a subsidiary treaty with the empress of Russia, who engaged to hold in readiness an army of thirty thousand men, and forty galleys, to be employed in the service of the confederates, on the first requisition.

Influenced by these considerations, the king of France made advances toward an accommodation both at London and the Hague; and, as all parties, the subsidiary powers excepted, were heartily tired of the war, it was agreed to open a new congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, as soon as the plenipotentiaries should receive their instructions.

A.D. In the mean time, vigorous preparations for war were 1748. made in every quarter; but the preliminaries of a general pacification were signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, and a cessation of arms took place, before any enterprise of consequence was undertaken, except the siege of Maestricht. Saxe, having invested that important place in the spring, concerted his measures with so much judgment, that Lowendahl was enabled to carry on his operations without interruption, though the army of the confederates, under the duke of Cumberland, to the number of a hundred and ten thousand men, lay in the neighbourhood. The town was defended by twenty-four battalions of Dutch and Austrian troops, commanded by baron D'Aylva, who opposed the besiegers with great skill and resolution. They prosecuted their approaches, however, with extreme ardour; and effected, at last, a lodgment in the covered way, after an obstinate dis

pute, in which they lost two thousand of their best troops. But they were dislodged, on the following day, by the spirit 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. Saxe accordingly took possession of Maestricht, while the garrison marched out with the customary honours of war.

But although the negotiation was thus far advanced in the beginning of summer, so many were the difficulties started by the ministers 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; as did also admiral Knowles, in an attack upon St. Jago de Cuba. Knowles, however, took port Louis, on the south side of Hispaniola, and demolished the fortifications. He also defeated, off the Havanna, a Spanish squadron of equal force with his own, and took one ship of the line. At length the definitive treaty was signed, and hostilities ceased in all quarters'.

Oct. 7.

This treaty had for its basis a general confirmation of all preceding treaties from that of Westphalia downward, and, for its immediate object, a mutual restitution of all conquests made since the beginning of the war, with a release of prisoners without ransom. The principal stipulations provided, that the dutchies of Parma, Placentia, and Gustalla, should be ceded as a sovereignty to Philip, and the heirs male of his body; (but it was also stipulated that if he or his descendants should succeed to the crown of Spain or that of the Two Sicilies, or die without male issue, those territories should return to the present possessors, the queen of Hungary and the king of Sardinia, or their descendants;) that the subjects of his Britannic majesty should enjoy the Assiento, with the privilege of the annual ship, during the reversionary term of four years, which had been suspended by

1 Contin. of Rapin, vol. ix.

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 should guarantee to his Prussian majesty the dutchy of Silesia and the county of Glatz; and that the Pragmatic Sanction should be solemnly confirmed, with the exception of the cessions made by this and former treaties.

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 no prospect of their being more successful, had they even been reinforced with 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:-and Louis 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 mercenaries, 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,