e common tyrant, the universal foe.

[Footnote 47: From a review of Sir Walter Scott's "Life of Napoleon,"
printed in the _Christian Examiner_ in 1827 and now included in Volume
I of the collected edition of Channing's writings.]

Such was Napoleon Bonaparte. But some will say he was still a great
man. This we mean not to deny. But we would have it understood that
there are various kinds or orders of greatness, and that the highest
did not belong to Bonaparte. There are different orders of greatness.
Among these the first rank is unquestionably due to moral greatness,
or magnanimity; to that sublime energy by which the soul, smitten with
the love of virtue, binds itself indissolubly, for life and for death,
to truth and duty; espouses as its own the interests of human nature;
scorns all meanness and defies all peril; hears in its own conscience
a voice louder than threatenings and thunders; withstands all the
powers of the universe which would sever it from the cause of freedom
and religion; reposes an unfaltering trust in God in the darkest hour,
and is ever "ready to be offered up" on the altar of its country or of
mankind.

Of this moral greatness, which throws all other forms of greatness
into obscurity, we see not a trace in Napoleon. Tho clothed with the
power of a god, the thought of consecrating himself to the
introduction of a new and higher era, to the exaltation of the
character and condition of his race, seems never to have dawned on his
mind. The spirit of disinterestedness and self-sacrifice seems not to
have waged a moment's war with self-will and ambition. His ruling
passions, indeed, were singularly at variance with magnanimity. Moral
greatness has too much simplicity, is too unostentatious, too
self-subsistent and enters into others' interests with too much
heartiness, to live an hour for what Napoleon always lived, to make
itself the theme, and gaze, and wonder of a dazzled world. Next to
moral, comes intellectual greatness, or genius in the highest sense of
that word; and by this we mean that sublime capacity of thought,
through which the soul, smitten with the love of the true and the
beautiful, essays to comprehend the universe, soars into the heavens,
penetrates the earth, penetrates itself, questions the past,
anticipates the future, traces out the general and all-comprehending
laws of nature, binds together by innumerable affinities and relations
all the objects of its knowledge, rises from t