only the object;
the obstacle must give way."

"When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and
satisfied."--

"I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern
society.--He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the
internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the
opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse."

But he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and
finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson
gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation
superfluous:--

"In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power
and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but
with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

"So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the
power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry
of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; '_Assez de
Bonaparte_.'"

It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death
we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible
satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by
her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks
and ruins.

But after all, Carlyle's "_carriere ouverte aux talens_" is the
expression for Napoleon's great message to mankind.

"Goethe; or, the Writer," is the last of the Representative Men who
are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the
fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in
the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that
he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could
hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found
the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with
side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds
an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his
author. "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"He has
said the best things about nature that ever were said.--He flung into
literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has
been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the
Prometh