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including Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine, did hardly furnish one half of his armed multitudes. His civil and diplomatic agents, no insignificant instruments of his power, were taken from among the natives of all the countries above mentioned. How can the head, the mover of such a system, be considered as exclusively French? During the ten years of his imperial sway, his armies lived at the expense of Europe; they were cantonned over Italy, Spain, and Germany; and they, by his own acknowledgment, constituted Napoleon's chosen people. "I must consult, above all, the feelings of my army," he said to Fouché in 1812. "I am all of my army and for my army, and I would rather destroy all Italy than give up two of my soldiers," he said to Admiral Truguet in the council of state on the occasion of a debate on the colonies. When, in 1813, his foreign auxiliaries forsook him, he felt that there was an end of his empire. He would not consent to restrict himself to France alone; he must be either emperor of the West, or nothing. We do not mean here to discuss the wisdom or justice of the claim: we only mention it to prove that Napoleon was an European character; and that we have all a right to judge him, without the French, or any other people, making it a national question, or taxing our judgments with national partiality. And, indeed, after his fall, some of his most zealous admirers, and even advocates, have been found among English writers, and some of his most severe censors among the French. Surely we may now, twenty years after his disappearance from the political stage, express our opinion of Napoleon's conduct towards the countries subject to his

sway, towards mankind, in fact,-without the French fancying themselves bound to maintain, vi et armis, the perfection of that extraordinary man's character, and the absolute wisdom of his political conduct. His military renown is certainly identified with that of France; and we really believe that in no other country, with no other troops, he would have attained that giddy height from which he ruled awhile over one half of the civilized world the French may well rest satisfied with sharing that most brilliant part of his fame, and need not gratuitously load themselves with the responsibility attached to his acts as a statesman and ruler in the countries he conquered, or as a politician towards those nations against which he was engaged in hostilities. Europe has paid dearly enough for the right of judging its last conqueror.

Bonaparte's mind was vast rather than lofty; it could embrace the earth, but it did not rise above the earth's surface; it held little or no communion with things above. A sceptic and indifferentist in religion by his own acknowledgment, he looked down upon all moral and metaphysical science, which he sneeringly called ideology; he had but an indifferent opinion of men in general, and a contemptuous one of women. Of the principles of commerce and of political economy he was totally ignorant: he once told a deputation from the merchants of Hamburgh, who complained of their losses in consequence of his absurd Continental system, "that the more failures there were at Hamburgh, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, &c., the more England would be distressed, and the sooner she would be reduced to sue for peace." His taste in literature was not very exalted; in the ca

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talogue of his travelling library, compiled under his own direction, the tales of Marmontel and of Florian are carefully noted down, while the works of Rousseau are formally excluded: among the epic poets, Lucan and the Henriade are inserted; but Virgil, Camoens, and Milton are not. Milton's great poem, except two or three passages, he called a rhapsody. His dislike of Tacitus, whom he accused of falsehood and calumny, is well known. He seems, however, to have relished Corneille, Moliere, and Racine; but his favourite book of poetry was that which goes by the name of Ossian. He was angry against Voltaire for having praised Shakspeare. "I have read their

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Shakspeare," he said, (N. B. in a French translation,)" and I find nothing in it, nothing which can be compared to Corneille or Racine." Alfieri, of course, he could not bear. He was in his earlier years a great reader of novels. general officer, who was with him at the time of the famous passing of the St. Bernard in 1800, on entering his apartment at Martigny, found him with a book in his hand, which proved to be the Adventures of Guzman d'Alfarache, the Spanish picaro, or beggar-thief. In modern history, he seems to have had a somewhat better choice; but his reading was confined to French historians who, with few and chiefly recent exceptions, abound in `declamation, and are not remarkable for discrimination and accuracy. Hence we find him adopting many exaggerated notions against foreign countries, which he afterwards found out by experience to be erroneous when he visited them himself. He acknowledged to De Pradt, at Valladolid in 1809, that he did not know Spain,-that he had been quite deceived concerning that country;

and he made a similar admission concerning Russia after his fatal expedition. Who can say but that the wrong judgments he had read concerning those countries stimulated him to his unjust and ill-judged attacks upon them?

In his early Italian campaigns he appears likewise to have been almost frantic with prepossessions against Venice; he talked of nothing but of Inquisition, Council of Ten, pozzi and piombi, the canal Orfano, the lion's mouth and the tortures, as if these things had really existed in his time in all the fearful reality of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. This impression, derived from superficial information, probably contributed to his ungenerous and shameful treatment of that republic; and after all he was obliged to acknowledge to the Directory, that the immense majority of the Venetian citizens lived perfectly satisfied under their old government, and that "there were not three hundred democrats in all Venice." It is amusing to see how easy he fancied it was for a man to become acquainted with a country by means of books. When he sent De Pradt on his Polish embassy, he told him, "You know Poland; of course you have read Rulhiere!" And here we must observe he had certainly hit upon one of the best existing works on old Poland, though Rulhiere is accused of many inaccuracies by the Poles. On another occasion, he made a pompous but perfectly fruitless appeal to the Hungarians in 1809," to assemble according to their ancient customs in the fields of Rakos, and to choose a native king among themselves." He judged of the Hungarians from the French and the northern Italians, the only two people he really knew. Of England, its

national character and social system, he seems to have remained profoundly ignorant to the last day of his life. He was also evidently mistaken in his estimate of the German character: he had scanned its surface, but did not dive into its depth. After witnessing for years their patient resignation under his worrying and overbearing dictatorship, he was taken by surprise at the noble rousing of that great people in 1813. In fact, no man could calculate better than Napoleon material resistance, and his own means of overcoming it; but of moral resistance, of the spiritual energy of nations, he had but a very imperfect notion, because he had not experienced it either in France or Italy. It was this moral resistance which he rashly faced in Spain, and which he himself afterwards roused in Germany, in Russia, and over the whole continent. We remember a French gentleman, employed under his government in Italy, saying at the beginning of 1809, on some allusion to the affairs of Spain, "Our Emperor is mistaken with regard to public opinion, and public opinion will prove his ruin."

His estimate of the relative importance and power of nations was deduced from the material elements, extent, population, military resources. In all the insolent pride of physical force, he used to consider all states under ten millions of people as incapable of having a will of their own, and he treated it as an impertinence on their part if they pretended to assert their independence. This was his language to Switzerland, to Sweden, to Holland, to Portugal, to the minor German and Italian states. In his positive mathematical view of things, to attempt resistance with inferior means appeared to be a sort of

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