All was

men have thus been molded, and molded cold. solid; nothing gushed forth in that mind, nothing was moved. His metallic nature was felt even in his style.

He was, perhaps, the greatest writer of human events since Machiavel. Much superior to Cæsar in the account of his campaigns, his style is not the written expression alone; it is the action. Every sentence in his pages is, so to speak, the counterpart and counter impression of the fact. There is neither a letter, a sound, nor a color wasted between the fact and the word, and the word is himself. His phrases, concise, but struck off without ornament, recall those times when Bajazet and Charlemagne, not knowing how to write their names at the bottom of their imperial acts, dipped their hands in ink or blood, and applied them with all their articulations impressed upon the parchment. It was not the signature, it was the hand itself, of the hero thus fixed eternally before the eyes; and such were the pages of his campaigns dictated by Napoleon,- the very soul of movement, of action, and of combat.

This fame, which constituted his morality, his conscience, and his principle, he merited by his nature and his talents, from war and from glory; and he has covered with it, the name of France. France, obliged to accept the odium of his tyranny and his crime, should also accept his glory with a serious gratitude. She cannot separate her name from his without lessening it; for it is equally intrusted with his greatness as with his faults. wished for renown, and he has given it to her; but what she principally owes to him is the celebrity she has gained in the world.

She

This celebrity, which will descend to posterity, and which is improperly called glory, constituted his means and his end. Let him, therefore, enjoy it. The noise he has made will resound through distant ages, but let it not pervert posterity or falsify the judgment of mankind. This man, one of the greatest creations of God, applied himself with greater power than any other man ever possessed to accumulate therefrom, on his route, revolutions and ameliorations of the human mind, as if to check the march of ideas and make all received truths retrace their steps. But time has overleaped him, and truths and ideas have resumed their ordinary current. He is admired as a soldier; he is measured as a sovereign; he is judged as a founder of nations; great in action, little in idea, nothing in virtue, such is the man.

THE CORSICAN NOT CONTENT

WILLIAM H. SEWARD

WILLIAM H. SEWARD was born at Florida, Orange County, N. Y., in 1801. He is noted chiefly for his career as a public man. He graduated from Union College in 1820. He acquired a high reputation as a criminal lawyer. He was elected to the State Senate in 1830, Governor in 1838, and the United States Senate in 1849. He was made Secretary of State under Lincoln. He died in 1872.

NLY two years after the birth of John Quincy Adams, there appeared on an island in the Mediterranean Sea a human spirit endowed with equal genius, without the regulating qualities of justice and benevolence which Adams possessed in such an eminent degree. A like

career opened to both. Born, like Adams, a subject of a king, the child of more genial skies, like him, became in early life a patriot and a citizen of a new and great Republic. Like Adams, he lent his service to the State in precocious youth, and in its hour of need, and won its confidence.

But, unlike Adams, he could not wait the dull delays of slow and laborious but sure advancement. He sought power by the hasty road that leads through fields of carnage, and he became, like Adams, a supreme magistrate, a consul. But there were other consuls. He was not content. He thrust them aside, and was consul alone. Consular power was too short; he fought new battles, and was consul for life. But power, confessedly derived from the people, must be exercised in obedience to their will, and must be resigned to them again, at least in death. He was not content.

He desolated Europe afresh, subverted the Republic, imprisoned the patriarch who presided over Rome's comprehensive See, and obliged him to pour on his head the sacred oil that made the persons of kings divine, and their right to reign indefeasible. He was an emperor. But he soon saw around him a mother, brothers, and sisters, not ennobled, whose humble state reminded him, and the world, that he was born a plebeian. He had no heir to wait impatient for the imperial crown.

He scourged the earth again and again. Fortune smiled on him even in his wild extravagance. He bestowed kingdoms and principalities on his kindred; put away the devoted wife of his youthful days, and another, a daughter of Hapsburg's imperial house, joyfully ac

cepted his proud alliance. Offspring gladdened his anxious sight; a diadem was placed on its infant brow, and it received the homage of princes, even in its cradle.

Now he was indeed a monarch,-a legitimate monarch; a monarch by divine appointment; the first of an endless succession of monarchs. But there were other monarchs who held sway in the earth. He was not content. He would reign with his kindred alone. He gathered new and greater armies from his own land, from subjugated lands. He called forth the young and the brave, one from every household; from the Pyrenees to the Zuyder Zee, from Jura to the ocean. He marshaled them into long and majestic columns, and went forth to seize that universal dominion, which seemed almost within his grasp.

But ambition had tempted fortune too far. The nations of the earth resisted, repelled, pursued, and surrounded him. The pageant was ended. The crown fell from his presumptuous head. The wife who had wedded him in his pride, forsook him when fear came upon him. His child was ravished from his sight. His kinsmen were degraded to their first estate, and he was no longer emperor, nor consul, nor general, nor even a citizen, but an exile and a prisoner, on a lonely island in the midst. of the wild Atlantic.

Discontent attended him there. The wayward man fretted out a few lonely years of his yet unbroken manhood, looking off, at the earliest dawn and the evening's twilight, toward that distant world that had only just eluded his grasp. His heart corroded. Death came, not unlooked for, though it came, even then, unwelcome.

He

was stretched on his bed within the fort which constituted his prison. A few fast and faithful friends stood around him, with the guards, who rejoiced that the hour of relief from long and wearisome watching was at hand.

As his strength wasted away, delirium stirred up the brain from its long and inglorious inactivity. The pageant of ambition returned. He was again a lieutenant and a general, a consul, an emperor of France. He filled again the throne of Charlemagne. His kindred pressed around him, again invested with the pompous pageantry of royalty. The daughter of the long line of kings again stood proudly by his side, and the sunny face of his child shone out from beneath the diadem that encircled his flowing locks. The marshals of the empire awaited his command.

The legions of the Old Guard were in the field, their scarred faces rejuvenated, and their ranks, thinned in many battles, replenished. Russia, Prussia, Austria, Denmark, and England gathered their mighty hosts to give him battle. Once more he mounted his impatient charger and rushed forth to conquest. He waved his sword aloft, and cried: "Tête d'Armée!"1 The feverish vision broke, the mockery was ended. The silver cord was loosed, and the warrior fell back upon his bed a lifeless corpse. The Corsican was not content!

1 Tate darmā.