ONE:Such were the conditions on which this great contest was finally terminated. The Americans clearly had matters almost entirely their own way, for the English were desirous that everything should now be done to conciliate their very positive and by no means modest kinsmen, the citizens of the United States. It was, in truth, desirable to remove as much as possible the rancour of the American mind, by concessions which England could well afford, so as not to throw them wholly into the arms of France. The conditions which the Americans, on their part, conceded to the unfortunate Royalists consisted entirely of recommendations from Congress to the individual States, and when it was recollected how little regard they had paid to any engagements into which they had entered during the warwith General Burgoyne, for examplethe English negotiators felt, as they consented to these articles, that, so far, they would prove a mere dead letter. They could only console themselves with the thought that they would have protected the unhappy Royalists, whom Franklin and his colleagues bitterly and vindictively continued to designate as traitors. Franklin showed, on this occasion, that he had never forgotten the just chastisement which Wedderburn had inflicted on him before the Privy Council for his concern in the purloining of the private papers of Mr. Thomas Whateley, in 1774. On that occasion, he laid aside the velvet court suit, in which he appeared before the Council, and never put it on till now, when he appeared in it at the signing of the Treaty of Independence.
ONE:Had Lord Ellenborough rested satisfied with this proclamation, all would have been well; but he issued another proclamation which at once shocked the religious feelings of the people of England by its profanity, and covered him with ridicule by its absurdity. He meant it to be a great stroke of policy; but it was simply a foolish and gratuitous concession to an idolatrous priesthood, while it exasperated the pride and fanaticism of the Mahometans. This was the celebrated Somnath Proclamation. Its authenticity was at first gravely doubted in India, but when, at length, it was placed beyond doubt, there was an outburst of censure and ridicule such as never before overwhelmed a Governor-General of India. "My brothers and my friends," it ran, "Our victorious army bears the gates of the Temple of Somnath in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Sultan Mahomed looks upon the ruins of Ghuznee. The insult of 800 years is at last avenged. The gates of the Temple of Somnath, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your national glory, the proof of your superiority in arms over the nations beyond the Indus. To you, princes and chiefs of Sirhind, of Rajwarra, of Malwa, and of Guzerat, I shall commit this glorious trophy of successful war. You will yourselves, with all honour, transmit the gates of sandal wood through your respective territories to the restored Temple of Somnath." One might have supposed that the princes, chiefs, and people of India thus addressed by the supreme representative of a Christian nation were all pure Hindoos; and that the temple from which the gates had been carried away, 800 years before, was still in their possession; whereas it was in ruins, and the sacred ground on which it stood was trodden by Mahometans. Even if the temple had been standing and occupied by the ancient idols, the Hindoo priests would have regarded the gates as polluted by being so long in the possession of unbelievers. Viewed as the reversal of a national humiliation the act was equally absurd. It could be no gratification to a subjugated race to have restored to them by a foreign Power a trophy that had been carried away 800 years before. Worst of all, the gates were discovered to be spurious copies of the originals. The Temple of Somnath was never restored, and the gates were consigned to an armoury.
ONE:The year 1763 opened with the signing of the[176] definitive treaty at Paris on the 19th of February, whence it was called the Peace of Paris. Five days later, a peace was signed between Prussia and Austria at Hubertsberg, in Saxony, to which Saxony, as the ally of Austria, was a party. Indeed, when England and France, Russia and Sweden, had withdrawn from the contest, there was little prospect of the continuance of the war. Both parties were exhausted, and yet, of the two, Frederick, in his dogged firmness, and in the almost unparalleled endurance of his people, was more than a match for Austria. If Maria Theresa could not cope with him when she had France, Russia, Saxony, and Poland, all united with her to put him down, the case was now hopeless. The English had stipulated that France should evacuate all the places in Germany and Flanders that belonged to those countries, and Frederick had easily induced the German states, in these circumstances, to a maintenance of neutrality. Austria, therefore, consented to this peace. She stood out the longest for the retention of Glatz, the only place won from Frederick still in her hands, but she was compelled to yield that, too. Both parties returned to the same situations as before the commencement of this fatal Seven Years' War.Since the appearance of the Waverley Novels the poetry of Scott has been somewhat depreciated, but his metrical romances, if not of the highest class of poetry, are always fresh, from their buoyancy and the scenery in which they are laid. They are redolent of the mountain heather and summer dews; and the description of the sending of the "fiery cross" over the hills, and the battle in "Marmion," as well as other portions, are instinct with genuine poetic vigour. Campbell, who won an early reputation by his "Pleasures of Hope," is more esteemed now for his heroic ballads "Hohenlinden," "The Battle of the Baltic," and his "Mariners of England;" Moore, for his "Irish Melodies," than for his "Lalla Rookh;" Byron, for his "Childe Harold," rather than for his earlier love tales of the East, or his later dramatic poems. Amongst the very highest of the poets of that period stands Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. 1792; d. 1822), the real poet of spiritual music, of social reformation, and of the independence of man. Never did a soul inspired by a more ardent love of his fellow-creatures receive such a bitter portion of unkindness and repudiation. John Keats, of a still more delicate and shrinking temperament, also received, in return for strains of the purest harmony, a sharp judgment, in no degree, however, equal to the severity of that dealt out to Shelley. In his "Ode to a Grecian Urn," and his "Lamia," Keats left us examples of beauty of conception and felicity of expression not surpassed since the days of Shakespeare. In his "Hyperion" he gave equal proof of the strength and grandeur to which he would have attained.
