med had perverted a heart
naturally kind and affectionate, and left him little leisure to devote
to the virtues which decorate domestic life. The numberless anecdotes
related of him, the charm with which he won to himself all whom he
attempted to conciliate, the warm attachment of those immediately about
him, tend to the belief that there was much of good in him. But his eye
was continually fixed on the star he saw blazing before him, and in his
efforts to follow its guidance, he heeded not the victims he crushed in
his onward progress. He considered men as mere instruments to extend his
dominion, and he used them with wasteful expenditure, to advance his
projects or to secure his conquests. But he was not cruel, nor was he
steeled to human misery. Had he been what he is sometimes represented,
he never could have retained the ascendency over the minds of his
followers, which, regardless of defeat and suffering and death, lived on
when even hope had gone.

Accusatory words are easily spoken, and there is often a disposition to
condemn, without calculating the compelling motives which govern human
actions, or the height of place which has given to surrounding objects a
coloring and figure not to be measured by the ordinary rules of ethics.
Many a man who cannot bear a little brief authority without abusing it,
who lords it over a few dependants with insolent and arbitrary rule,
whose temper makes everybody uncomfortable within the limited sphere
of his government and whose petty tyranny turns his own home into a
despotic empire, can pronounce a sweeping doom against one who was
clothed with irresponsible power, who seemed elevated above the
accidents of humanity, whose audience-chamber was thronged by princes,
whose words were as the breath of life, and who dealt out kingdoms to
his kindred like the portions of a family inheritance. Let censure,
then, be tempered with charity, nor be lightly bestowed on him who will
continue to fill a space in the annals of the world when the present
shall be merged in that shadowy realm where fact becomes mingled with
fable, and the reality, dimmed by distance, shall be so transfigured by
poetry and romance, that it may even be doubted whether he ever lived.

Seventeen years after the period which I have attempted to illustrate
by a few incidents, I stood by his grave at St. Helena. I was returning
from a long residence in the East, and, having doubled the stormy Cape
of Good Hope, look