PREFACE TO THE FORTIETH VOLUME

Summary

THE Volume that concluded our record of the public events of the year 1817, has in its most mournful feature become in some degree the prototype of this. In the decease of our late beloved Queen, we have another awful memento of the ultimate vanity of human distinctions, and of our own mortality. The King still lives; an instance no less awful, to reprove the pride of man! What is wealth or greatness that such sacrifices to them as are made, should be made, seeing that sovereignty itself affords no exemption from the heaviest of all human afflictions! Dark in body and in mind, what is the existence of our good old King? It is incomprehensible, but as an evidence of Almighty Power, who can give the body to live without the mind, or with the mind subdued and superinduced by a foreign spirit! Oh were that of our excellent Sovereign again restored to that susceptibility of impression which constitutes the perfection of human existence, what astonishment would seize it on a relation of the events which have occurred since its lapse.—The power of Buonaparte, which set at defiance all moral calculation of defeat, broken, and reduced to its original elements, and himself a prisoner in a remote island, under British custody!!!