while new openings to power might be occurring in the capital of France. Handing over the command of the army of Egypt to Kleber, he embarked on the 23rd of August, 1799, at Rosetta, and on the 16th of October was again in Paris.

It is now doubted by no one, that the gov

defence, therefore, was virtually committed to this almost unknown man, who had for weeks been soliciting employment in vain, and submitting to half starvation in the garrets of Paris. He justified the character given him by Barras, that he "would not stand upon ceremony." Sweeping the streets of Paris with grape-shot, he put down ruth-erning motive in this desertion of his army lessly what was unquestionably a popular rising, and established the authority of the Convention and the Directory. He soon received his reward, being named to the command of the army of Italy. "Advance this man," said Barras to the other Directors, or he will advance himself without you!" Thus, at the age of twenty-six, the energy and talent of this aspiring spirit had exalted its owner to a position which experienced and famous captains would have naturally coveted. Already he was a distin-ident of the Council of Five Hundred, and guished man. One of the Directors remarked to him, "You are very young!" "In a year,” he replied, "I shall either be old, or dead." To a friend he added, "In three months I will either be in Milan, or back in Paris."

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We are not writing the history of Napoleon's wars, and shall therefore only say, that in two campaigns he subdued Italy and effectually humbled Austria. The treaty of Campo Formio was one of the greatest humiliations that an emperor of Germany had ever endured. The French general returned to Paris, the victor of Lodi, of Arcola, and of Rivoli. Already he had taken his place among the first of living generals.

was personal ambition. Thus his eulogist Thiers says, "It was one of those rash acts by which great and ambitious minds tempt Heaven." The throne of France was the object to which his sleeping and waking thoughts now ceaselessly turned. He treated the Directory with courtesy, but with coldness; and "upon him," says Thiers, "all eyes, all wishes, and all hopes were immediately fixed."

His brother Lucien had been elected Pres

with him, conjointly with Talleyrand and Sieyes, were all Napoleon's plans concerted. In less than a month his arrangements were completed. On the 10th of November he ordered three regiments of dragoons to meet for review; the Council of the Ancients was assembled in the Tuileries, and a decree was proposed and adopted, declaring General Bonaparte commander of all the troops and national guards of the capital. The Directors themselves, haughtily upbraided by this new military dictator, resigned their offices ; and the next day, the Council of Five Hundred, meeting at St. Cloud, and surrounded by Napoleon's troops, were, after a struggle, dispersed by a few companies of grenadiers, and the French Republic came to an ignominious close.

The very next spring, a plan suggested by himself was adopted by the Directory, and an expedition to Egypt and the Mediterra- A few partisans of the Bonapartes assemnean was sent forth under his command. At bled soon after, under the presidency of Luthe head of forty thousand men, he sailed cien, and declared the adjournment of the in May, 1798, for Malta, which island sur-two councils until February of the next year, rendered to him in June. Egypt soon fell and the installation, meantime, of three under his power, but in the bay of Aboukir consuls, Napoleon, Sieyes, and Ducos, in Nelson destroyed his fleet. In various en- whose hand all the powers of government gagements with the Turks and Mamelukes, were placed. In December the farce of a the French were constantly victorious; but New Constitution" was performed; and Napoleon soon saw the fruitlessness of all Bonaparte was named Chief Consul, Camhis efforts, and he was disquieted by the baceres second, and Lebrun the third. On news from France. The Directory was be- the 19th February, 1800, the "Chief Concoming more and more unpopular; its Ital-sul" took up his abode in the palace of the ian campaign had been unfortunate; all men Tuileries, the ancient abode of a long line began to anticipate another change, and the of kings. aspiring young Corsican could not be satis-, He was now in reality the master of fied to remain in the sandy plains of Egypt, France. Immediately putting his armies in

mony."

motion, he himself, in May, departed for be gained, "he never stood upon cereItaly, where, on the 14th of June, he achieved the splendid victory of Marengo. By that one battle he regained all that the Directory had lost in their unfortunate campaign of the preceding year. Again Austria yielded, and by the treaty of Lunville, in 1801, acknowledged the First Consul, yielded Tuscany and Flanders, and gave to Nepoleon Bonaparte once more the éclat of having dictated the terms of peace to the Emperor of Germany.

drawn.

We find him, then, the sovereign of one of the greatest kingdoms of the earth. "Never before," says Mr. Gleig, "since the world began, had circumstances, and his own marvellous genius, raised an individual so wondrously as Napoleon Bonaparte rose from a private station to a throne; never before had such vast power, wealth, and resources been committed to the keeping of one man." But they were indeed "committed" to him, In 1802 England concluded peace with by the Great Ruler of the universe, for the him, which, however, was merely an armed wisest ends; and when those ends had been ́ truce, lasting little more than a year. Dur- accomplished, they were as wondrously withing this period Napoleon's Chief Consulate was declared to be for life; and soon afterwards the power of naming his successor was conceded to him; so that nothing but the name of royalty was wanting. This was soon added; for on the 18th of May, 1804, he openly assumed, in pursuance of a decree of the senate, the style and title of Emperor of France. Less than ten years had sufficed to raise him from the rank of a junior officer of artillery, to the highest throne in Europe, In October, 1795, he was an unemployed and almost starving officer, lounging about the streets of Paris; in May, 1804, he was the monarch of France, the object of trembling alarm to all the sovereigns of Europe, the lord and the master of twenty palaces, and the commander of the finest army in Europe. Scarcely can the annals of the world furnish another instance of so rapid and so vast an ascent.

Nor did the world lay to his charge any remarkable crimes in his eager rise to the pinnacle of power. He had privately murdered no master and benefactor, like Hazael; he had assassinated no rival, like Bruce; he had dethroned and slaughtered no sovereign, his relative, like Henry of Lancaster. His worst actions, the alleged poisoning of his sick soldiers in Egypt, and the execution of the Duc d'Enghien, were regarded as measures of policy by his admirers, for which some plausible pretexts might be advanced. A student and admirer of Plutarch, he lived for history; and having no legitimate title to the throne, he sought popularity and a glorious name. Hence he was not needlessly cruel or wicked; but Barras' description of him held good through life; and whenever a political object was to

Being raised up, however, chiefly as a scourge, and not as a benefactor of mankind, it did not please God to change his heart, or to alter or modify his natural character. His aim never rose above mere secular power and dominion, and the fame which naturally followed them. From Plutarch he had learned to admire and to covet fame and glory; but beyond this, he seemed never to have a single aspiration.

Mr. Emerson, when selecting a series of "representative men," each being specimens of a class, names Napoleon Bonaparte as "THE MAN OF THE WORLD." And truly he was "of the earth, earthy." So far as we can gather, no kind of religion ever gained the least hold upon his mind. His natural sagacity preserved him from that senseless atheism which had besotted myriads in revolutionary France; and when a knot of "philosophers " had declaimed, in his hearing, against the very idea of a God, he could reply with the acuteness of a practical mind, by pointing to the starry heavens, and exclaiming, "Tell me, then, who made all those ?" But he was truly "the man of the world;" and the men of the world usually reject atheism, and take refuge in deism. Like them, he never pretended to be a saint; -to use his own words, "he was no Capuchin." He would fain lead a decent and respectable life, like the best of Plutarch's heroes, and had no fondness for crime, or for the grosser vices; but if a crime appeared to be necessary, "he was not the man to stand upon ceremony." He always kept the Italian proverb in mind, "If you would succeed, you must not be too good."

Such was the man who had, in about

seven or eight years, fought or scrambled Napoleon might easily have found some his way to a throne, and that throne one of plausible justification; but his assault on the highest in Europe. Let us now inquire Spain and Portugal, which commenced in how he conducted himself in that high posi- 1807-8, was wholly destitute of all pretext tion. This part of his history, viewed apart or reasonable plea. He invaded Portugal from that of his fall, is but brief. It extends almost without taking the trouble to assign over no more than eight years. In May, a reason; he then inveigled the whole Span1804, he became Emperor of France, and in ish royal family to Bayonne, and there May, 1812, he set forth on his march for forced from each of them in turn a formal Moscow-the first of those terrible failures abdication of the throne. He poured 300,which ended in his ruin. 000 men into the devoted country, and resolved to bestow its crown on Joseph, one of his own brothers. These enormous acts of reckless and tyrannous aggression alarmed all Europe, and they were, finally, the substantial cause of his ruin. So he himself confessed, in his exile at St. Helena: "It was that unhappy war in Spain which ruined me. The results have irrevocably proved that I was in the wrong. That unfortunate war in Spain proved a real wound -the first cause of the misfortunes of France. Had I known at the first that the transaction would have given me so much trouble, I would never have attempted it." • His eulogist, Thiers, confesses the same fault, saying, "He was drawn on from chicanery to perfidy, and came to affix to his name a blot which has forever tarnished his glory.”†

He had been formed and prepared, in the counsels of Divine Providence, as a scourge for Europe. A scourge, equally for the papal kingdoms of Italy and Spain and Austria and Southern Germany, and for the now semi-infidel realms of Northern Germany; and the seven years on which we are now entering, were years of victory and "glory" for Napoleon and France, and of defeat and shame for every other power in Europe with but one exception.

Placing the imperial crown on his own head, and receiving the papal benediction, in December, 1804, he repeated the ceremony in May, 1805, at Milan, as King of Italy. That same autumn witnessed the third chastisement of Austria. The surrender of Ulm, with 20,000 men, and the battle of Austerlitz, which cost Austria more than 50,000, brought on an immediate submis-. sion; the emperor again surrendering whole provinces, and Bonaparte creating three kingdoms, for dependants of his own out of the spoils.

Prussia, with absolute fatuity, had stood aloof while Austria was being crushed; but in the very next year her own turn came. At Jena her noble army of 150,000 men was scattered, and the monarchy of Prussia was laid in the dust.

Such was the work of 1806. In 1807, Russia, the only remaining continental power of the first rank, was similarly humbled. The battle of Friedland brought on the peace of Tilsit, by which Russia and Prussia were once more admitted to external amity with France,-Prussia, however, only with the sacrifice of half her territory.

The whole of Central and Northern Europe had now suffered a terrible chastisement at the hands of this "scourge of God," and the southern kingdoms were next to receive their share. For his past wars with Austria, Italy, Prussia, and Russia,

For nearly two years, 1808 and 1809, Europe seemed to stand in terror and aghast, while he was overrunning and subjugating Spain. But in the latter year, Austria, again alone, was permitted to call down upon herself a fourth chastisement. Contrary to all the plainest dictates of common sense, without any attempt to gain the aid of Russia or Prussia, or of the minor powers of Germany, she rushed once more into the field, and after an indecisive contest at Aspern, was utterly defeated at Wagram, and again made peace, sacrificing 45,000 square miles of territory, and giving up one of her princesses to the sad fate of marriage with Napoleon Bonaparte.

This marriage took place in 1810; and that year, and in the following spring, "the fortunes of Napoleon and of the French empire may be said to have reached their culminating point. He gave the law to the whole of Europe, England and Russia alone excepted: his empire now comprising all that portion of the continent which is

*Las Casas, iv. 204, 205. †Thiers, viii. 658.

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skirted by the German ocean on the north; true character of the proceedings at Bayby the Lower Elbe, the Rhine, the Alps, onne; proceedings which even his admirer and the Adriatic on the east; by the Medi- Thiers characterizes as stained with “chiterranean on the south; and by the Gulf of canery and perfidy," and which led to the Genoa and the Pyrenees on the west. But slaughter of half a million of human beings? the power and influence of Napoleon ex- Into these transactions, however, he was, as tended far beyond this. Bavaria was his he says, drawn;" his purpose was simply submissive ally; and the smaller States "to filch a kingdom," the long and bloody east of the Rhine acknowledged him as their war which followed his attempt being merely protector. A new kingdom-that of West- a disappointment and a disaster. Carlyle, phalia was presided over by one of his himself scarcely a professor of Christianity, brothers; while Prussia, reduced to a State quotes Scripture in speaking of him, and of the third order, existed only by suffer- says, "The man was given up to strong deance; and Austria, having given Napoleon lusion, that he should believe a lie." a wife, gave him also her fealty, and paid Yet was he truly "a representative man," him tribute. Spain and Portugal still re- -a just representative of men of the world, sisted; but the resistance of States so fee-—of the men who follow the old counsel― ble scarcely affected the stability of an em"Get wealth and place, if possible, with grace; pire, of which Europe had never seen the If not, by any means, get wealth and place." equal since Augustus from the Roman Capitol controlled the destinies of the civilized world."

In little more than twelve years, then, from his first emergence from obscurity, and in only seven from his recognition as emperor, had this remarkable man secured for himself a place in the Temple of Fame not inferior to that of Alexander, of Cæsar, or of Charlemagne. It is while he occupies this elevated place, that we must try to form an estimate of his character, his peculiarities, and his moral rank.

He was truly described by Emerson, as a leader, pattern, and representative of the men of the world. He did not desire or intend to be worse than other men, and so to excite a general abhorrence; nor did he ever dream of setting himself up as "better than other men," and so to disgust their selflove. He could commit crime when it seemed necessary, but he would not willingly rush into it; for he had read Plutarch, and coveted fame. He himself says: "Men of my stamp do not commit crimes; I have always marched with the opinion of great masses, and with events; of what use, then, would crimes be to me?"

Yet he had either ordered or approved the murder of the Duke d'Enghien, of Toussaint l'Ouverture, and of Palm the bookseller, all unquestionable crimes. These, however, were probably of too insignificant a character to dwell in his memory. But what save self-delusion could blind him to the Gleig's Campaign of Leipsic, p. 2.

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There is a certain sat

"Bonaparte," says Emerson, was the idol of common men, because he had in a transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men. isfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte worked, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth, but for Bonaparte specially, without any scruple as to the

means.

He renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself with his hands and his head. With him

there is no miracle and no magic. Men give
way before such a man as before natural
events. Such a man was wanted, and such
a man was born; a man of stone and iron,
capable of sitting on horseback for sixteen
hours together; of going many days without
food or rest except by snatches, and with
the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a
man not embarrassed by any scruples, nor
to be balked or misled by any pretence."
Such was the man whom God had needed,
and whom, for a great purpose, God had
raised up.
"This capacious head, revolving
and disposing trains of affairs, and animat-
ing multitudes of agents; this eye, which
looked through Europe; this prompt inven-
tion; this inexhaustible resource."

But the "one thing" was wanting. He could raise his eye, and prosecute his debut signs, up to the earth's highest place; no higher. Beyond this world's wealth and

*Emerson, pp. 168, 169.

power, he never had an aspiration. And | Assyria, and the glory of his high looks.

We have, then, a great engine of punishment, raised up for a specific end. No moral excellences were needed, and none were given. The only kind of admiration we can award to Napoleon, is that which we award equally to Nebuchadnezzar, to Alexander, fitted for the work they had to do, and nei-was Rehoboam lured to his ruin; and after ther of them was too good for his mission.