hing that
the English have never understood about Napoleon, in all their myriad
studies of his mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I had
almost said how unimportant he was. He said himself, "I shall go down to
history with my code in my hand;" but in practical effects, as distinct
from mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his code
will go down to history with his hand set to it in signature--somewhat
illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates and
encouraged contented peasants in places where his name is cursed, in
places where his name is almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it
was natural that the annihilating splendour of his military strokes
should rivet the eye like flashes of lightning; but his rain fell more
silently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat here
that after bursting one world-coalition after another by battles that
are the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally worn down by
two comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and the
resistance of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that is
Russian, religious; but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that
which concerns us here, the valour, vigilance and high national spirit
of England in the eighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign tried
and made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as
Wellington; who has become all the more symbolic since he was finally
confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the latter at Waterloo.
Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in many ways
typical of the aristocracy; he had irony and independence of mind. But
if we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by their
class, how little they really knew what was happening in their time, it
is enough to note that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed
Napoleon by saying he was not really a gentleman. If an acute and
experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon, "He is not actually
a Mandarin," we should think that the Chinese system deserved its
reputation for being both rigid and remote.

But the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest another, and with
it the reminder that this, though true, is inadequate. There was some
truth in the idea that the Englishman was never so English as when he
was outside England, and never smacked so much of the soil as when he
was on the sea. There has run th