r between him and the
cruel sports of Mutabilities which are played "to many men's decay."

In one respect it will be allowed by all but absolutists that the
condition of Europe has changed greatly for the better in the last
eleven years, as a consequence of the triumphs of the French Emperor.
From the year 1815 to 1850, national independence was in its true sense
unknown to Continental Europe. The ascendency of Napoleon I. had small
claim to faultlessness, but the men who led in the work of his overthrow
proceeded as if they meant to make the world regret his fall. This is
the secret--which secret is none--of the reaction that speedily took
place in his favor, and which caused an alliance of Liberals and
Jacobins and Imperialists to do honor to his memory; so that, being
dead, he was from his island-sepulchre a more effective foe to
legitimacy and the established order of things than he had been from St.
Cloud and the Tuileries. It has been satirically said that a mythical
Napoleon rose from the dust of the dead Emperor, who bore no moral
resemblance to Europe's master of 1812. As to the resemblance between
the master of a hundred legions and "the dead but sceptred sovereign" of
1824, who ruled men's spirits from his urn, we will not stop to inquire;
but it can be positively asserted that the mythical Napoleon, if any
such creation there was, was the work of the true Napoleon's destroyers.
They earned the hatred and detestation of the greater part of the better
classes in the civilized world; and as it is the nature of men to love
those who have warred against the objects of their hate, nothing was
more natural than for Europeans and Americans to turn fondly to the
memory of one who had beaten and trampled upon every member of the Holy
Alliance, and who had carried the tricolor, that emblem of revolution,
to Vienna and Berlin and Moscow. Men wished to have their own feet upon
the necks of Francis and Frederick William and Alexander, and therefore
they were ready to forget the faults, and to remember only the virtues,
of one who had enjoyed the luxury they so much coveted. It would be
unreasonable to complain of that disposition of the public mind toward
Napoleon I. which prevailed from about the date of his death to that of
the restoration of his dynasty in the person of his nephew, or to sneer
at the inconsistency of "that many-headed monster thing," the people,
who had shouted over the decisions of Vittoria and Leipsi