as the son of a Corsican peasant-mother working
in a mulberry orchard, and who, after fifty-one years, eight months,
and twenty days, ended in a cyclone on the rock called St. Helena,
having meanwhile for nearly a third of his life bestridden western
Europe like a colossus,--a new biography claiming to be the ultimate
summation of the Emperor's life and character has appeared. Professor
William Milligan Sloane, of Princeton University, has entered the
lists which may be said to have opened with Walter Scott and finished
with the McClure Syndicate, passing meanwhile by way of such
personages as De Stael, Las Cases, Victor Hugo, and Lanfrey, and such
drudges as Bourrienne and Meneval, to lodge at last with the
miscellaneous hacks who get three dollars a column for their
boiler-plate philosophy in American newspapers! Heavens, what a
scrimmage!

It were difficult to say when the _final_ biography of a man has been
produced. Hard, hard is it to decide when anything in this world is
final. The never-ending progress of events shapes and readjusts not
only the present materials of history, but also by reaction the
materials of the past. Much that is supposed to be complete is seen to
be unfinished; the done becomes undone, and the peroration of an epoch
has to be rewritten for an exordium.

This is as true of the individual lives of men as it is of great
events. If the ages have to be reconstructed, so also must the men of
the ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a
papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus
in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from
the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in
Java, and every man from Moses to Cagliostro.

On the whole I incline to the opinion that Professor Sloane has
brought the Emperor Napoleon to a kind of final interpretation; I will
not say to a full stop, but to something very much resembling a
period. In the first place, I offer on the "Life of Napoleon
Bonaparte," the eulogium that the work has, in a great degree,
_naturalized_ the Corsican as he was never naturalized before--thus
bringing him out of cloudland and mere impossible fog to the plain
level of human action and purpose.

This is much. In accomplishing thus much Professor Sloane has
vindicated his claim to be regarded as a great biographer. It has been
the bane of nearly all biographical writing that the subjects of i