s which prove that his sympathies and goodness
to those who were notoriously undeserving was a fatal passion with
him. But there is no opinion, blunt though it be, that so completely
touches one as that of the plain English sailors who said at Elba that
"Boney was a d----d good fellow after all." "They may talk about this
man as they like," said one of the crew of the _Northumberland_, "but
I won't believe the bad they say of him," and _this_ view seems to
have been generally held by the men who composed the crew of the
vessel that took the Emperor to St. Helena. It is noteworthy that
English man-of-war's-men, and also merchant seamen of these stirring
times, should have formed so favourable an impression of Napoleon,
especially as the Press of England teemed with hostility against him.
Articles attributing every form of indescribable bestiality,
corruption, gross cruelty to his soldiers, subordinate officers, and
even Marshals, appeared with shameful regularity. In these articles
were included the most absurd as well as the most serious charges.

I include the following story as a specimen, and take it in particular
as being quoted quite seriously by certain anti-Napoleonic writers in
the endeavour to bolster up a feeble case. Prejudice and distorted
vision prevented them from seeing the absurdity of such attempts to
blacken the character of Napoleon. Let the reader judge!

It is related that, at the time of the Concordat, Napoleon remarked to
Senator Volney, "France wants a religion." Volney's courageous (!)
reply was, "France wants the Bourbons," and the Emperor is thereupon
supposed to have been attacked by a fit of ungovernable fury, and to
have kicked the Senator in the stomach!

The more serious charges included incest with his sister Pauline and
his stepdaughter Hortense, and the poisoning of his plague-stricken
soldiers at Jaffa.

His palaces were said to be harems, and his libertinism to put
Oriental potentates to the blush. So industrious were these foes to
human fairness that they manufactured a silly story just before the
rupture of the Treaty of Amiens, to the effect that Napoleon had made
a violent attack on Lord Whitworth, the British Ambassador. So violent
was he in his gestures, the Ambassador feared lest the First Consul
would strike him. Even Oscar Browning is obliged to refute this
unworthy fabrication as being absurd on the face of it, but it has
taken ninety years to produce the authentic docu