acing himself
before the last cannon? No! emphatically, no! With Napoleon he might have
cried, 'It is finished,' but then with the same calm brow yet bursting
heart, he would have resigned his sword to his conquerors; and if the
scaffold were his fate, met it with quiet dignity; or if the dungeon,
there calmly await the Almighty's time when he might again raise his right
arm for his country; still as great in the prison or on the scaffold, as
when he was at the head of conquering armies. Napoleon's intellectual
character was perceptive rather than deep; and there is an intense
concentrativeness about him, a power of throwing the whole effort of his
soul into the environment of the moment, which is remarkable; and not less
so the facility with which he changes that concentration from place to
place, from subject to subject. Probably no man ever had his whole mind so
much under the control of his will, at his fingers' ends, as it were; 'the
eye to see and the will to do.' But revert we to CARLYLE.

* * * * *

Some call for Barras to be made commandant; he conquered in Thermidor.
Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen BONAPARTE,
unemployed artillery officer who took Toulon. A man of head, a man of
action: Barras is named Commandant's Cloak; this young artillery officer
is named Commandant. He was in the gallery at the moment, and heard it; he
withdrew some half hour to consider with himself: after a half-hour of
grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he answers _yea_. And
now, a man of head being at the head of it, the whole matter gets vital.
Swift to camp of Sablon, to secure the artillery; there are not twenty men
guarding it! A swift adjutant, Murat is the name of him, gallops, gets
thither some minutes within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that
way: the cannon are ours. And now beset this post and beset that; rapid
and firm; at Wicket of the Louvre, in Cul-de-sac Dauphin, in Rue St.
Honore, from Pont Neuf all along the North Quays, southward to the Pont
_ci-devant_ Royal, rank round the sanctuary of the Tuilleries, a ring of
steel discipline; let every gunner have his match burning, and all men
stand to their arms. Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint Roche; has
seized the Pont Neuf, our piquet there retreating thence without fire.
Stray shots fall from Lepelletier, rattle down on the very Tuilleries'
stair-case. On the other hand, women a