him by whose sepulchre all that was noble and
memorable in the living generation stood in reverence and sorrow, than the
last hour of the prisoner of St Helena! Both were emblems of their
nations. The Englishman, manly, pure, and bold, of unshaken firmness, of
proud reliance on the resources of his own nature, and of lofty
perseverence through good and through evil fortune. The foreigner,
dazzling and daring, of singular intellectual vividness, and of a thirst
of power which disdained to be slaked but at sources above the ambition of
all the past warriors and statesmen of Europe. He was the first who
dreamed of fabricating anew the old Roman sceptre, and establishing an
empire of the world. His game was for a prodigious stake, and for a while
he played it with prodigious fortune. He found the moral atmosphere filled
with the floating elements of revolution; he collected the republican
electricity, and discharged it on the cusps and pinnacles of the European
thrones with terrible effect. But, from the moment when he had dissipated
that charm, he lost the secret of his irresistible strength. As the head
of the great republic, making opinion his precursor, calling on the old
wrongs of nations to level his way, and marshaling the new-born hopes, the
ancient injuries, and the ardent imaginations of the continental kingdoms
to fight his battles; the world lay before him, with all its barriers
ready to fall at the first tread of his horse's hoof. As an Emperor, he
forged his own chain.

Napoleon, the chieftain of republicanism, might have revolutionized
Europe; Napoleon, the monarch, narrowed his supremacy to the sweep of his
sword. Like a necromancer weary of his art, he scattered the whole
treasury of his magnificent illusions into "thin air;" flung away his
creative wand for a sceptre; and buried the book of his magic "ten
thousand fathom deep," to replace it only by the obsolete statutes of
courts, and the weak etiquette of governments in decay. Fortunate for
mankind that he committed this irrecoverable error, and was content to be
the lord of France, instead of being the sovereign of opinion; for his
nature was despotic, and his power must have finally shaped and massed
itself into a stupendous tyranny. Still, he might have long influenced the
fates, and long excited the awe and wonder, of Europe. We, too, might have
worshipped his Star, and have forgotten the danger of the flaming
phenomenon, in the rapidity and eccentric