THE YEAR OF LIBERATION.

THIS is n work which compensates us for the perusal of a great deal of trash. Here are truth, spirit, humour, and information, combined on a subject of great and perpetual interest : the con- duct of invaders, the sufferings of the invaded, their hopes, anx- ieties, and their absurdities, in times of the most distinguished im- portance, and in scenes on many accounts of great moment. The author appears to have been a visitor at Hamburg soon after it had thrown off the intolerable yoke of the French, on the news of NAPOLEON'S reverses in Russia; and witnessed the behaviour of' the townspeople, and the various incidents, previous to and during the siege of the place by DAvousr. after the reaction. He only left Hamburg on the day of the entry of the French. At the period embraced by the writer, all eyes were on Ham- burg: it had had the hardihood first to dare French Imperial

power, which had not then lost its prestige it was likely to

become the key of the movements of the Northern arraies descending upon the Emperor, and at any rate was the city of the Continent on which alone for ten years an enemy of Franc.) had ventured to put his foot. All this was independent of the perma- nent interest attached to the fortunes of a wealthy city, renowned

in the annals of commerce, and which, by its many olose ties with

England, has always been considered one of our most ancient allies. The author is, however, a man of fancy, humour, and great vivacity, and no little knowledge ; and out of a far less subject, would have made a charming book. His pictures, his anecdutes,.his sketches of movements and discussions of character, when joined to.the life of the memoranda jotted down while the events were warm, go to form one of the pleasantest works we have encountered for a Iong time. He brings back in full force all the horrors of French tyranny. The Berlin Decrees are shown more manifestly in action

than has ever yet been done; and his reports of the conduct of the Imperial agents, their arbitrariness, insolence, rapacity, and

corruption, confirmed as they arc on all hands, set the NAPOLEON sway in its true light. Then there are sketches of military pro- ceedings, given with exceeding life and clearness: sometimes they are derived from the reports of friends ; but whemthey relate to Hamburg, the author is himself an eye-witness. The author begins as early in the story of his adventures as-his departure from England in the packet. The first chapter is. an

amusing account of the voyaoee, set off by some good" sketches of character. Next, " Heligoland," at that time, as most recollect, a spot of most unexpected importance: the account of. the state of things on this dot on the ocean is very curious and lively, as well as most instructive. We recommend it strongly in its entire state to the partisans of prohibitive decrees in commerce, and shall only quote a few remarks on Sugar-and the Berlin Decrees. The German merchant was tenacious or life; and English produce made its way through the double lines of the Douaniers. The quantity of bribery, per-

jury, and profligacy was enormous, but the revenue gained nothing. But it was when the French reverses in the North weakened the barrier, that dm of d traffic set in upon it with a tide which would have swept it away in its strongest

days. Smuggling became universal. Colonial produce seemed to have suddenly

become a necessary of life; and sugar and coffee were prizes for which the German often ran risks which far outdid his chivalry in the field. Where courage was essential, the trafficker played the hero; though where the business could be accomplished by dexterity, he spared his courage and only outwitted the Frenchman.

The first French ordinances, whose military makers evidently, conceived that sugar came in loaves from the cane, had been levelled only against "refined sugar," originally the chief object of importation into the French dependencies; for the famous Hamburg refineries had perished. But the Heligoland clerks speedily gave the French lawmakers reason to know, that sugar might be found under other conditions, for they instantly poured in quantities of it in its raw state. The news readied Paris, and an ordinance was framed to arrest the un- foreseen evil, by prohibiting all sugar in the "shape of grain or pulverization." The clerks were on the alert again; they dissolved the sugar, and inundated the French with barrels of this new eau suere. Another ordinance made war against fluid sugar, followed by a succession of decrees, as the &leans in the cabinet were enlightener' by successive discoveries of the nature of this intrusive material : until the clerks, weary of torturing sugar, hit upon the idea of a wholesale.sys.- tem of douceurs. The new contrivance worked incomparably, and was found so congenial to the tastes of the Customhouse people, and probably of their masters in Paris, that while Napoleon continued cannonading away at every phantasma of regular trade, the contraband went on flourishing with the

piest activity.

Trivial as such transactions appear, the memory of this period may forth no trivial lesson to some future master of mankind. Cabinets and armies were found to be more easily disposed of than the coffee-cups of a region of .slaves. The spirit of national resistance which left the ministers and generals,. the whole embroidered aid-de-campship of the Continental governments, to run their race of submission, took refuge and revived among the traders in Germany,. the smallest of generations ; • probably altogether forgotten by those stately functionaries, and certainly for he first time reckoned among the elements of

war. Yet those traders were the men who gave the first blow to the universal conqueror ; the gnats who stung the behemoth to death; the Lilliputians who tied the man-mountain to the ground.

Napoleon might have galloped his charger over Europe, making her castles the dust of its hoofs to the last of his days, but for his forgetting the spell which, more than cannon or bayonet, fought for the republic—the " Guerre aux palais, pail aux cabanes." He had now fallen on the caleanes, and from that moment he was undone. The nations, long discontented with their sove- reigns, had seen him trampling them down, and never moved a muscle. But when they found his heel pressing on the neck of every man alike, they sprang up and crushed him. Moscow or Leipsic, the snow or the sword, may have been the direct instruments, but the effectual reason lay in the prospect of actual beggary. Alexander, Francis, and William were but links in what a sarant would call the chain of causality. The ultimate cause lay in the fiery hemi- sphere of sugar and coffee ; and the spade of a negro delving without a shirt in Jamaica or St. Kitts, undermined the throne of the master of the world.

This is the style of building in this queer Place— The dwellings of such a fragment of Europe are scarcely worth speaking of, except as curious evidences of the grasp which a predominant idea, the sea, here takes of the mind ; and as a model of the general sea-coast habitations of the North. The whole house is but a ship aground ; its entrance is a porthole, and its rooms are the closest resemblance that the architect, or rather the ship carpenter, can frame to a cabin ; yet for a bed in this cabin, in the prosperous times of the island, the landlord, I am told, has sometimes contrived to charge a guinea a night. The tables are generally trunks, which probably have made many a voyage. The lodger sleeps not in a bed, but in a berth, in the side of the room, mortised into a hole five feet high up the wall, to which he climbs by a ladder, and where, when he awakes in the dusk of the morning, with the roar of the winds and the eternal dash of the waters in his ears, with the timbers of the house heaving. and creaking round him, and the air filled with the smell of salt and seaweed, it requires sonic soberness of thinking, to doubt that the whole establishment has weighed anchor, and is going " right away before the wind."

The next extract is an entry in the journal, and presents a lively idea of the arrival of the first alarm in a wealthy city of the ap- proach of the invader.

Niyht. All in confusion. Certain intelligence has arrived at last. A dra- goon has just brought in a despatch, stating that the advanced guard of Davoust's army are within a day's march of Lunenburg ; that the Hanoverian partisan corps are ordered to retire, and that the whole of the Russian light troops and patrols have been withdrawn to the right bank of the Elbe. Here are tidings for a huge, crowded, and utterly defenceless city. Well may England rejoice in her sea; that noble ditch, which costs her nothing to keep it in repair, which no enemy's spade can turn off, and no drought can dry. But who can have pa- tience with our war amateurs? Belligerents in their easy chairs; heroes in their night-gowns and slippers! Here is the rough reality. The French are coming—the men who have already marked their way through Germany with fire and sword ! and formidable as the announcement must be at any crisis, it is doubly so when they are hurrying forward with open vengeance to a city from which they had been angrily expelled, and where they are coming, not to con- quer, but to extinguish; not to fight the fair battle cf soldier against soldier, but to scourge and crush a population of rebels. When I saw the distress and dismay painted in every face round me, high and low; the people packing up their little property for flight, or rushing to their doors at the sound of every waggon that drove by, as if they expected to see the enemy's cavalry charging through the streets; icould have wished fur Aladdin's lamp, or any other means of transport, for the lovers of the romance of war ; and still mote for those "gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease," and find the world and their breakfast dull without " news from the armies," get through the day only by the help of the list of killed and wounded, and sleep in the faithful hope of a " remarkable conflagration or a "merciless" massacre by morning.

Here, at least, the amateurs would find stimulus enough; f.r the news, vari- ous as it is, all coincides in one centre; the enemy are at hand ! though whether within thirty miles, or as many furlongs, or whether Hamburg is to atone for its premature disloyalty by fire or sword, by pillage or the dungeon, or by the whole four, are questions which no one yet feels himself qualified to resolve. They would simply the quidnunc with the degree of uncertainty essential to his comforts; and in the doubt whether he was to be shot or sabred in his first sleep, he might lay himself on his pillow in the full enjoyment of all the pic- turesque of actual hostilities. In this state of things I asked a clever friend, long resident in the city, "what he would advise strangers to do ;" his answer was, "to get out of the scrape as Last as they can."

The following observations are full of truth, and are given as a specimen of the many acute remarks contained in these volumes on national manners.

Under such circumstances, the Englishman's habits are of use to him ; for he it known, that the Englishman is the only inhabitant of Europe who, between the hours of dinner and sleep, can stay at home. Be the weather wild as Boreas and Eurus together ever made it, the sun-loving Italian steals to his casino; the Frenchman rushes out into the whirlwind, to yawn for three hours in the same coterie where he has duly yawned every night for the last fifty years ; the Dutch- man finds a moral impossibility of smoking his pipe at home, and goes to enjoy it in the Harmonie ; the Spaniard's lemonade is tasteless unless he can sip it m the accustomed Caffeteria; and the German's schnapps and newspaper cannot go down except in the Guinguette atmosphere of brandy, lamp-oil, and the most pestilent tobacco fumes that ever nauseated the lungs of man.

This anti-home propensity accounts for half the phenomena of foreign life ; for the rarity of affection where it ought to be, and the universality of attach- ment where it ought not ; for the wretched profligacy of private life, and, as a consequence, for a good deal of the very scandalous corruption of public ; for the crowding of the theatres, the prosperity of the gaming-tables, and the gene- ral propensity to suicide.

The Englishman, on the contrary, can sit at home and bear to look at his • wife and children, without grudging the moments given to either as so much lost to sentiment and the billiard-balls. Yet his domesticity is severely tried in a huge old German town ; with society cut up root and branch ; with nothing in the newspapers but eternal soldiership; and nothing on his table but Gesner, sillier than his own sheep; or Die Edelfrau von Rosenstein, five endless acts of the blackest letter and spirit, and leaving the indefatigable head that could toil through it nothing to dread in Arabic or Sanscrit.

The following is a contrast such as can only be felt under very peculiar circumstances. We quote it as a trait of a town about to be besieged, consolatory to a lover of nature and a hater of war.

On the ramparts.I found the people, awakened at last to the possibility of capture, digging epaulements and planting cannon. Staff officers, couriers, and Cossacks, were galloping through the crowd; some of the burgher guard were taking their posts in the bastions; and mingled with all those matters of war, were promenaders, male and female, in their Sunday costunse-s-the wholifOrm- mg a very busy and even a very gay spectacle. A solitary bugle or trumpet was heard, as a patrol issued from the gates; but there was a perpetual lively dis- sonance of harps, horns, and violins, from the guinguettes, which are every- where. The coffeehouse harmony was in full vigour.

I grew weary of this bustle after a while, and took a long walls into the country. But though I thus escaped the clamour of the ramparts, the sound of the cannon still pursued me. It formed a strange and vexatious contrast to the evening and the scene. All round me was sweet, soft, and pastoral; cattle re-. turning homewards, children playing, birds on the bough ; the air cool from the river, and fragrant with the breath of gardens and shrubberies; the land- scape to the horizon, flat, but full of rich, sleepy beauty ; and, in the midst of this luxury of quiet, came, ever and anon, the startling roar of the cannon, telling that there was man and mischief again.

The remarks on the passport system and the gate-shutting are as just as they are lively. We wonder whether this old abuse will be exploded in France now that men have got into power there who have been made inhumbler stations to feel its inconveniences, and who have, moreover, ridiculed and abused it in their writings. The teaziug propensity to gates and passports is among the hundred evidences of the foolery that passes for wisdom on the Continent. The passport system is intolerable; it has all the demerit of being a nuisance to the honest traveller, while it never excluded a knave. All that can be pleaded for it, vexatious and wasteful as it is, is that it provides a little contemptible patronage for the little court ; and a little meagre subsistence for the lank, liver-coloured, half beggars and half thieves, who contrive to starve upon it at their desks from year to year. Its impediments to national intercourse, its annoyances to the traveller, and its demoralization of the miserable officials, who pilfer both traveller and revenue, never enter into the heads of the military personages who exercise sovereignty on the Continent. But the gate propensity has not even this beg.. garly patronage to plead; and yet nothing is more frequent than to find a town which could not resist an army of Friezland hens; a sort of cemetery above ground, whose whole population is divided between cripples and old women; shutting its gates daily with as much scrupulosity as if a hundred thousand Tartars were roving the land, and threatening to make a bonfire of every pauper of this decaying workhouse. So it goes on, frontier or interior, war or peace, alike; the crazy gates must be kept close until the commandant has ascertained that the coming post-chaise is not a Trojan horse with an invasion in its belly; and that a yawning Englishman and his valet may be admitted without danger of blowing up the empty magazine. In Hamburg the same absurdity is practised, with even more vexatious punctilio. For the last hundred years it has been out of the case of strongholds; it could have no hope of being shot at, starved, slaughtered, and burned, for six weeks together ; glory was excluded in all quarters, for the whole affair would have been ended in as many hours by the advanced guard of any of the armies that have flooded the fields of the Continent with their prodigal and profligate blood during the hundred years. The city had but a ditch and a rampart, yet its gates must be opened and shut with as much precision as if Louis le Grand or Alaric the Guth were waving torch and banner over the Hamburgher-berg. Unlucky was the jovial culprit, even in the most piping times of peace, who prolonged his Christmas banquet in the environs till /ire in the afternoon, for the gates were remorselessly shut at half-past four. Unlucky was the citizen, who, wiping the dust of his countinghouse from his soul, roved the evening fields in the merry month of June; for unless lie could speed back by half-past nine, in the fields he must make his bironac. And the vexation was made still more vexatious by the peril; dual change of the hour: for, once every fortnight cer- tain minutes were added or taken away ; and the citizen-errant must keep an almanac in his packet, and regulate his coffee by the town clock or sleep in a ditch. Even the mail-bag could not he suffered to pass when once the gates were shut ; from the obvious hazard that an enemy might be franked in as it went out, take the postman by storm, and advance from the capture of the bag to the spoliation of the city. And all this solemn vigilance had been trans- acting in times when the rivalry of sovereigns was concentered in their opera boxes ; when the black eagles of Hapsburgh and Brandenburgh were domestic fowls ; when the 'Napoleon eagle was in the shell, and the world was on half-pay.

We have given but a very imperfect report of the contents of these volumes ; but the reader, if he will take our advice, will supply the deficiency for himself. The moral of this work is admi- rable : it inculcates the absolute necessity of resisting invasion in the first instance, at any expense ; never admit the foreign occu- pant on any terms, and never permit the luxury and idleness of peace to undermine the capabilities of self-defence, and, by pursu- ing wealth and neglecting manliness, expose the community to be the prey of the first ruffian who appears in force before it. The whole book is a detailed commentary on these texts. The apropos of this publication is exceeding : much that is told of Hamburg may be supposed of Antwerp,—especially the thou- sand rumours, the alarms, the bombardment, the flight, and we hope as regards the Citadel—the capitulation.