he
appears to have faced his lesser task. As a biography, as a writing of
history, as an example of historic style, Lockhart's comparatively
modest essay must be called a better performance than Scott's. But "the
real Napoleon" has not yet been painted.

Lord Rosebery, in his book on _Napoleon: the Last Phase_, asks if there
will ever be an adequate portrait? The life is yet to be written that
shall profit by all the new material that has come to light since Scott
wrote his nine volumes in 1827, and Lockhart published his in 1829. But
Lockhart's book has still the value of one written by a genuine man of
letters, who was a born biographer, and one written while the
world-commotion of Napoleon was a matter of personal report. It is
tinged by some of the contemporary illusions, no doubt; but it is
clearer in its record than Scott's, and while it is less picturesque, it
is more direct.

His comparative brevity is a gain, since he has to tell how, in brief
space, "the lean, hungry conqueror swells," as Lord Rosebery says, "into
the sovereign, and then into the sovereign of sovereigns."

In view of the influence of the one book upon the other, and the one
writer upon the other, it is worth note that Lockhart had a fit of
enthusiasm over Scott's _Napoleon_ when it first appeared, or rather
when he first read the first six volumes of the work, before they were
"out," in 1827. He thought Scott would make as great an effect by it as
by any two of his novels. This proved a mistaken forecast, but Scott was
paid an enormous price--some eighteen thousand pounds. When then John
Murray, who had already co-opted Lockhart as his _Quarterly_ editor,
thought of inaugurating a "Family Library," and he proposed to his
editor this other Napoleon book, it must have seemed in many ways a very
attractive piece of work. But owing partly to Lockhart's relations with
Scott, and partly to the need of avoiding any literary comparisons,
these small, fat duodecimos appeared anonymously. That was, as it has
been already mentioned, in 1829, two years after Scott's book.

To-day, it makes a capital starting-point for the long Napoleon
adventure, whose end, so far as it is prolonged by fresh literary
divigations, seems to be as remote as ever.

It is from the French side that one might chiefly draw those vivid and
sometimes questionable glimpses at first-hand, that can best add to
Lockhart's presentment. One must compare his retreat from Russia with