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HAPPY DOWNFAL OF MILITARY EMPIRE.

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order ceases; but the activity remains. The multitudes that had been raised into intellectual existence by dangerous passions and crazy illusions, do not all relapse into their original torpor, when their passions are allayed and their illusions dispelled. There is a great permanent addition to the power and the enterprise of the community and the talent and the activity which at first convulsed the state by their unmeasured and misdirected exertions, ultimately bless and adorn it, under a more enlightened and less intemperate guidance. If we may estimate the amount of this ultimate good by that of the disorder which preceded it, we cannot be too sanguine in our calculations of the happiness that awaits the rising generation. The fermentation, it will readily be admitted, has been long and violent enough to extract all the virtue of all the ingredients that have been submitted to its action; and enough of scum has boiled over, and enough of pestilent vapour been exhaled, to afford a reasonable assurance that the residuum will be both ample and pure.

If this delight in the spectacle and the prospect of boundless good, be the first feeling that is excited by the scene before us, the second, we do not hesitate to say, is a stern and vindictive joy at the downfal of the Tyrant and the tyranny by whom that good had been so long intercepted. We feel no compassion for that man's reverses of fortune, whose heart, in the days of his prosperity, was steeled against that, or any other humanizing emotion. He has fallen, substantially, without the pity, as he rose without the love, of any portion of mankind; and the admiration which was excited by his talents and activity and success, having no solid stay in the magnanimity or generosity of his character, has been turned, perhaps rather too eagerly, into scorn and derision, now that he is deserted by fortune, and appears without extraordinary resources in the day of his calamity. We do not think that an ambitious despot and sanguinary conqueror can be too much execrated, or too little respected by mankind; but the popular clamour, at this moment, seems to us to be carried too far, even against this very

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NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

dangerous individual. It is now discovered, it seems, that he has neither genius nor common sense, and he is accused of cowardice for not killing himself, by the very persons who would infallibly have exclaimed against his suicide, as a clear proof of weakness and folly. History, we think, will not class him quite so low as the English newspapers of the present day. He is a creature to be dreaded and condemned, but not, assuredly, to be despised by men of ordinary dimensions. His catastrophe, so far as it is yet visible, seems unsuitable indeed, and incongruous with the part he has hitherto sustained; but we have perceived nothing in it materially to alter the estimate which we formed long ago of his character. He still seems to us a man of consummate conduct, valour, and decision in war, but without the virtues, or even the generous or social vices of a soldier of fortune; - of matchless activity indeed, and boundless ambition, but entirely without principle, feeling, or affection; - suspicious, vindictive, and overbearing; - selfish and solitary in all his pursuits and gratifications; - proud and overweening, to the very borders of insanity;- and considering at last the laws of honour and the principles of morality, equally beneath his notice with the interests and feelings of other men. - Despising those who submitted to his pretensions, and pursuing, with implacable hatred, all who presumed to resist them, he seems to have gone on in a growing confidence in his own fortune, and contempt for mankind, -till a serious check from without showed him the error of his calculation, and betrayed the fatal insecurity of a career which reckoned only on prosperity.

Över the downfal of such a man, it is fitting that the world should rejoice; and his downfal, and the circumstances with which it has been attended, seem to us to hold out three several grounds of rejoicing.

In the first place, we think it has established for ever the impracticability of any scheme of universal dominion; and proved that Europe possesses sufficient means to maintain and assert the independence of her several states, in despite of any power that can be brought

NO FUTURE RISK OF UNIVERSAL DOMINION.

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against them. It might formerly have been doubted,and many minds of no abject cast were depressed with more than doubts on the subject, whether the undivided sway which Rome exercised of old, by means of superior skill and discipline, might not be revived in modern times by arrangement, activity, and intimidation, and whether, in spite of the boasted intelligence of Europe at the present day, the ready communication between all its parts, and the supposed weight of its public opinion, the sovereign of one or two great kingdoms might not subdue all the rest, by rapidity of movement and decision of conduct, and retain them in subjection by a strict system of disarming and espionage - by a constant interchange of armies and stations and, in short, by a dexterous and alert use of those very means, of extensive intelligence and communication, which their civilization seemed at first to hold out as their surest protection. The experiment, however, has now been tried; and the result is, that the nations of Europe can never be brought under the rule of one conquering sovereign. No individual, it No individual, it may be fairly presumed, will ever try that fatal experiment again, with so many extraordinary advantages, and chances of success, as he in whose hands it has now finally miscarried. The different states, it is to be hoped, will never again be found so shamefully unprovided for defence- so long insensible to their danger- and, let us not scruple at last to speak the truth, so little worthy of being saved -as most of them were at the beginning of that awful period; while there is still less chance of any military sovereign again finding himself invested with the absolute disposal of so vast a population, at once habituated to war and victory by the energies of a popular revolution, and disposed to submit to any hardships and privations for a ruler who would protect them from a recurrence of revolutionary horrors. That ruler, however, and that population, reinforced by immense drafts from the countries he had already overrun, has now been fairly beaten down by the other nations of Europe - at

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IMPRESSIVE WARNING TO AMBITION,

ger. Henceforward, therefore, they know their strength, and the means and occasions of bringing it into action; and the very notoriety of that strength, and of the scenes on which it has been proved, will in all probability prevent the recurrence of any necessity for proving it again.

The second ground of rejoicing in the downfal of Bonaparte is on account of the impressive lesson it has read to Ambition, and the striking illustration it has afforded, of the inevitable tendency of that passion to bring to ruin the power and the greatness which it seeks so madly to increase. No human being, perhaps, ever stood on so proud a pinnacle of worldly grandeur, as this insatiable conqueror, at the beginning of his Russian campaign. He had done more he had acquired more

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and he possessed more, as to actual power, influence, and authority, than any individual that ever figured on the scene of European story. He had visited, with a victorious army, almost every capital of the Continent; and dictated the terms of peace to their astonished princes. He had consolidated under his immediate dominion, a territory and population apparently sufficient to meet the combination of all that it did not include; and interwoven himself with the government of almost all that was left. He had cast down and erected thrones at his pleasure; and surrounded himself with tributary kings, and principalities of his own creation. He had connected himself by marriage with the proudest of the ancient sovereigns; and was at the head of the largest and the finest army that was ever assembled to desolate or dispose of the world. Had he known where to stop in his aggressions upon the peace and independence of mankind, it seems as if this terrific sovereignty might have been permanently established in his person. But the demon by whom he was possessed urged him on to his fate. He could not bear that any power should exist which did not confess its dependence on him. Without a pretext for quarrel, he attacked Russia-insulted Austria trod contemptuously on the fallen fortunes of Prussia — and by new aggressions, and the menace of

AND SALUTARY DIMMING OF MILITARY GLORY. 187

more intolerable evils, drove them into that league which rolled back the tide of ruin on himself, and ultimately hurled him into the insignificance from which he origin

ally sprung.

It is for this reason, chiefly, that we join in the feeling, which we think universal in this country, of joy and satisfaction at the utter destruction of this victim of Ambition, and at the failure of those negociations, which would have left him, though humbled, in possession of a sovereign state, and of great actual power and authority. We say nothing at present of the policy or the necessity, that may have dictated those propositions; but the actual result is far more satisfactory, than any condition of their acceptance. Without this, the lesson to Ambition would have been imperfect, and the retribution of Eternal Justice apparently incomplete. It was fitting, that the world should see it again demonstrated, by this great example, that the appetite of conquest is in its own nature insatiable;-and that a being, once abandoned to that bloody career, is fated to pursue it to the end; and must persist in the work of desolation and murder, till the accumulated wrongs and resentments of the harassed world sweep him from its face. The knowledge of this may deter some dangerous spirits from entering on a course, which will infallibly bear them on to destruction;-and at all events should induce the sufferers to cut short the measure of its errors and miseries, by accomplishing their doom at the beginning. Sanguinary conquerors, we do not hesitate to say, should be devoted by a perpetual proscription, in mercy to the rest of the world.

Our last cause of rejoicing over this grand catastrophe, arises from the discredit, and even the derision, which it has so opportunely thrown upon the character of conquerors in general. The thinking part of mankind did not perhaps need to be disabused upon this subject; — but no allusion was ever so strong, or so pernicious with the multitude, as that which invested heroes of this description with a sort of supernatural grandeur and dig

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