There is little perfect truth in the most sagacious of historians, and little pure love of it in the best of men. We are as unwilling to exchange our thoughts for another's as our children, whatever more they may possess of strength or beauty; and the way to conciliate our suffrages is not by dictating and teaching, but by laying before us evidences and testimonies, by collecting what may corroborate them from circumstances, and by raising us to the dignity of judges. The ancients drew characters; we discourse on them; a much easier matter. Everything now is compendious and economical: we make soups from bones, and histories from metaphysics.

Bonaparte seems to me the most extraordinary of mortals; because I am persuaded that so much power was never acquired by another with so small an exertion of genius, and so little of anything that captivates the affections; or maintained so long unbroken in a succession of such enormous faults, such scandalous disgraces, such disastrous failures and defeats. I investigate him with the same dispassionate attention, as Lacépède would the spine of a serpent from Surinam, or Cuvier the jaws of a mammoth from the Ontario.

English Visiter. Persons who are elevated to high rank, however modest and virtuous, assume more or less of a fictitious character, but congenial and agnate, if I may say it, with the former. Bonaparte would be whatever he had last read or heard of; Brutus or Borgia, Frederick or Charlemagne. All appeared best that were most striking; no matter for what; and not only a book whenever it fell in his way, or a story when he had patience to listen to it, but even a new suit of clothes, changed him suddenly. If his hair had been clipt in the morning, he was at noon a Marius, at night a Sylla; no sooner had he put on a court-dress, than he took a lesson of dancing; for Louis XIV. danced; no sooner the uniform of a marshal, than he tried to sing; for Villars sang.

Landor. Whoever is an imitator, by nature, choice, or necessity, has nothing stabile: the flexibility which affords this aptitude, is inconsistent with strength.

on the field, or killed, or thrown into the rivers. He informs us that many, on somewhat recovering from their lamentable state, went mad from thirst and hunger, and that among those who were first cast into the water, the hands of many, as they clung in agony to the barks, were broken. Landor. Fortunate! not he who can restrain his indignation or his tears at this recital; but he who, turning his eyes upon a Sidney, as he waves away the water from his own parched lips to the wounded soldier near him, can say, "This was my country-man, that my enemy."

Florentine Visiter. Much hath been repeated of the studious and retired habits of his youth. I had inquired into these matters, long before I perused the narrative I have quoted; the inquiry would otherwise have been superfluous; for no very studious man was ever very cruel; no two things in nature have less affinity than violence and reflection.

Landor. M. St. Leger, lieutenant-colonel of the regiment in which he was ensign, told me that he never at that period had heard of his progress in any branch of the mathematics; that he was chiefly remarkable for the dirtiness of his hands and linen, his vulgar pronunciation and phrases, his aversion to the society of the officers, and his propensity toward the least respectable of the privates. This too would have been corrected by study. If Pompey had studied like Cæsar, he might not indeed have possessed the clemency and amenity of that accomplished man, nor have been in any respect worthy to be called his rival, but he would certainly have been less contracted and self-sufficient, less unsteady and impatient, less arrogant, vindictive, and ferocious.

English Visiter. I remember no general, worthy of the name, reviling the character of those military men who performed their duty against him : for Cæsar in his Anti-Cato did not attack the captain, but the senator and the patriot. Bonaparte left unuttered no term of ungovernable rage and vulgar contumely, when Sir Sydney Smith precluded him from the subjugation of Europe by his defence of Acre.

Published by Ostinelli, Como, 1796.

Landor. History for her own sake must soften some characters and equivocate on some facts. She treads confidently and firmly upon blood; she follows her clue unhesitatingly through the labyrinths of mystery and of crime; she is embarrassed only by vulgarity and baseness. We

feel a deep interest whenever great masses of mankind are moved, and seldom think or are altogether ignorant what trifling things are the movers. Florentine Visiter. Bonaparte was invidious of the dead almost to the same degree as of the living. One time he asserted that Marlborough owed his successes to Eugene, another that Eugene owed his to Marlborough; and any officer would have been ruined who had suggested that Marlborough was not present at the battle of Belgrade. In a conversation at Varese, just before his visit to Como, he appears to have mistaken Gustavus Adolphus for Charles XII. On hearing that the army of Gustavus had penetrated into Italy by the lake of Como, of which a terrific account is given in the letters of Boldoni, he denied the fact, and added, "That madman never thought about Italy; he had other affairs, other interests; he was sans tactique, sans calcul."

Landor. And yet Napoleon in his youth was a historian. He took his manuscript to Paoli: it was such as might have been expected from an admirer of Ossian. Paoli, not long before his death, mentioned the fact at Clifton, and said he believed the young man had never pardoned the freedom of his advice, in recommending that the work should be delayed a little, until the impetuosity of his genius had subsided. I should have imagined that the sentences were short, as from the tripod; the general said that on the contrary they were excessively verbose, strangely metaphorical, without any regard to punctuation, or rather to that upon which punctuation is founded; that, when you had come, as you believed, to the end of your march, you were to start again; and often, on setting out, you were suddenly stopped and countermanded. In the latter part of his life he wrote well.

Florentine Visiter. His discipline hath been extolled, and examples are cited of soldiers, in every campaign, shot for petty thefts. To avoid an examination into the wealth of his dukes and princes, such as Cambacérés, Fouché, Talleyrand, and several of his marshals and grand dignitaries: the General Mouton, when he dined at the Escurial, which he did every day with the King and Queen of Spain, took away the plate after dinner, until none was left.

Landor. This fact, reported in the country where it occurred, was confirmed to me at Florence by my friend Galiano, who was present.

English Visiter. Whatever in different men may have been the difference of punishment for the same offence, where society was interested; however it may have been permitted by special privilege that he who had renounced the deity might renounce the laws, that he who had abjured the bishop might supersede the citizen; all offences were equally unpardonable which were committed against Napoleon.

Landor. Another proof of a weak intellect: not that forgiveness is any proof of a strong one. Offences that can be pardoned should never be taken Bonaparte took them indiscriminately and

voraciously, as his food. There is no trouble or address in finding them, and in showing them there is no wisdom or content.

His ideas of a ruling star present a still more signal indication of a vacillating and ill-composed mind. He knew nothing of judicial astrology, which hath certain laws assigned to it, and fancied he could unite it with atheism, as easily as the iron crown with the lilies; not considering that ruling stars themselves must have a ruler, and must obey, far more certainly than they can indicate, his designs and will.

Florentine Visiter. Afterward he laid by the star, and took up the crucifix to play with; on which some sweeter recollections and more delightful hopes might have reposed, if ever he could have brought himself to the persuasion that either a man or a god would suffer pain, or disseminate good, gratuitously. In the same manner and degree as he was inconsistent in principle he was irresolute in action. He lost his presence of mind when he advanced to dissolve the representatives of the people; he lost it at the battle of Marengo; and when the allies were marching into Paris, he appeared to be deprived, not of his judgment only and his senses, but of locomotion.

English Visiter. In one thing he was singular, and altogether different from every other man: when he had accomplished his design, he was as fond of appearing dishonest as he was satisfied with having been so he was the only pickpocket in the world that ever laid before the people the instruments of his trade, and showed ostentatiously how he had used them. Indeed he had few secrets to keep. He invaded the territory of nations to whom any possible change might reasonably appear a gainful speculation. Neither force nor fraud, nor bribery itself, however largely and judiciously administered, subverted the continental states: it was effected by the credulity of their hopes and the incapacity of their rulers. His attack was against the cabinet: those within cried for quarter, gave a province or two for a ransom, kept their places resolutely (who would abandon them in times so critical?), complimented their master, rang their church-bells, fired their jubileecannon, if one was left: for they had surrendered only their country! Austria and Prussia fell; they had kings and kings' servants within. Spain and Portugal, unsuspicious, unprepared, undisciplined, unarmed, resisted successfully; their kings and kings' servants stood without. Where there are interests, real or apparent, distinct from those of the community, that, whatever it be, wherein they lie, should be shovelled down and carried off; for there is the ground upon which the enemy will mount his first masked battery. Everywhere kings and oligarchies soon seconded Bonaparte; nations spurned and expelled him.

Florentine Visiter. If he had been contented to marry in a family no higher, or not much higher, than his own, the graft might have taken and the bark have healed over; but dashing to the earth the light of experience, he took a wife from a

stock uprooted and rejected from the land it had exhausted. The canker it bore inherently caused the blight and decay of a plant so recently sprung above-ground. The higher ranks, and the lower equally, turned away with disgust and indignation at the union of a French soldier with an Austrian arch-duchess. Of his fidelity or infidelity toward his allies I have nothing to remark, other than that, from whatever motive, he did greatly and incomparably more service to several who had fought against him, and after discomfiture and subjugation had become his friends, than some governments which boast loudly of their good faith and generosity did to the most faithful and persevering of their confederates. I have truly no leisure for discoursing, and could excite no interest if I did, on princes first degraded into crimp-sergeants, then caparisoned like cooks and ostlers for billets and relays, then running the gauntlet, and drummed from their dominions; on princes in short who felt, and whose conduct has made others feel, that even this was clemency. The description of tyrants is at least a stirring thing: it is like walking over redhot ploughshares: and the vulgar are not the first in pressing on to an exhibition so strange and antiquated.

When I was at Naples, the Marchese Rodio, formerly a minister in the reign of Ferdinand, received the orders of that king to place himself at the head of some insurgents in Calabria. He surrendered by capitulation: in despite of which, he was ordered for trial under a military commission, and was acquitted.* He wrote an account of his happy escape to his wife and his friends. But, in the midst of this security and joy, an order came from the emperor that the same judges should bring him again to trial. Such an order could not be misinterpreted: they condemned him and he was shot from behind, as a felon, a traitor, and a rebel to his legitimate prince. This was considered by the army as an assassination ;+ and it would have been so considered even if the emperor had committed it in his own dominions. Never was an atrocious crime perpetrated from a

:

*The words of Courier are, "et, chose étonnante, acquitté." Vol. 1. Mémoires et Correspondance. He adds

other assassinations, with this reflection. "Assurément, monsieur, ces choses-là ne sont ni du siècle où nous vivons, ni de ce pays-ci. Tout cela s'est passé quelque part au Japon ou bien à Tombouctoo." Even a Frenchman, and one accustomed to the judicial murders of Robespierre, cries out aloud in the midst of the army against these darker atrocities, as too inhuman for the age.

"Sa mort passe ici pour un assassinat et pour une basse vengeance. On lui en voulait parce qu'étant contraire au mariage que l'on proposait d'un fils ou d'une fille de Naples avec quelqu'un de la famille. L'empereur a cette faiblesse de

tous les parvenus; il s'expose à des refus. Il fut refusé là et ailleurs." Such are the expressions of Paul-Louis Courier, chef d'escadron, the deepest thinker in all the French armies, and certainly as honest, as calm, as unprejudiced a writer as ever commemorated the actions of Bonaparte. He adds, "Quand le général Vx. commandait à Livourne, il eut l'ordre (et l'exécuta) de faire arrêter deux riches négocians de la ville, dont l'un périt comme Rodio... Nous avons vu ici (à Naples) un courier qui portait des lettres de la

baser motive. He suspected (and it could only be suspicion) that Rodio, when minister, dissuaded the acceptance in marriage of a Bonaparte by the royal family. It has always been wonderful to me, what sympathy any well-educated Englishman can have with an ungenerous, ungentlemanly, unmanly Corsican.

Landor. Eccellino and Borgia lived in ages when religion glared and glimmered fitfully on a benighted world, rendering the darkness the more horrible, and when atheism sat predominant in the Vatican. No feature of crime was novel, no attitude or stroke of violence was unexpected. But Bonaparte lived when Europe was one large jury-box, and when even France, recovering from the leprosy she had bathed with blood, had placed a bench of judges before him. He committed deliberately and slowly the most cruel, coldhearted murder of Toussaint L'Ouverture, while the eyes of a Sismondi, of a Courier, and of a De Stäel, were fixed upon him.

Florentine Visiter. Bonaparte had perhaps the fewest virtues and the faintest semblance of them, of any man that has risen by his own efforts to supreme power: and yet the services he rendered to society, incommensurate as they were with the prodigious means he possessed, were great, manifold, and extensive. Never had been such good laws so well administered over so large a portion of Europe; never was right obtained with so moderate a cost; never was injury so speedily redressed. Two of the bravest and most orderly nations of the Continent received the benefit of excellent kings at his hands. Bernadotte and Louis Bonaparte, the most upright men of their order, gave no signs, either by violence or rapacity, by insolence or falsehood, that they had been nurtured in the feverish bosom of the French Republic. But by Napoleon's insatiate love of change, by his impatience to see anything or to be anything long together, his mild, intelligent, and virtuous brother, was forced to abdicate a throne, which he mounted amid the curses of the people and descended amid their tears. That he might not be an oppressor he ceased to be a king; and his short unquiet reign is mentioned with gratitude, by the most republican and least sensitive member of the great European family.

English Visiter. Instead of scoring maps and shifting kings, Napoleon could have effected more than Henry IV. designed. The road was paved for him with well-broken materials and well rolled over. There was hardly a statesman in Europe of capacity enough to direct a workhouse, or write a fair copy of a washerwoman's bill. Energy was extinct upon the Continent: in England it was displayed by the crazy fanatics, who wandered from field to marketplace, from marketplace to field, roaring to the people that they were damned:

reine, assassiné par ordre, ses dépêches enlevées, envoyées à Paris. L'homme qui fit le coup, ou du moins l'ordonna, je le vois tous les jours." Lettre à M. de Sainte-Croix à Paris; Naples, Juillet 1807.

a truth which indeed they might have discovered by themselves, if they had only put their hands into their pockets. While, as Kléber says in your Dialogue, "throughout the whole territory of France, throughout the range of all her new dominions, not a single man of abilities was neglected," in England son succeeded to father in the oligarchy, and expeditions were formed just weighty and durable enough to give fortunes to those who had squandered them. Of our generals, the most distinguished was one that rose from bed after midday; of which when orders were requested, the first answer was, "His lordship is at breakfast;" the second," His lordship is at lunch;" the third, "His lordship is at dinner;" the fourth, "His lordship is dead-drunk.” The armament had been directed, first against an island where fevers are as periodical as rains under the tropics, and ultimately against a fortified city: neither the climate of the one nor the strength of the other was known by the wisest of the ministers, although there is hardly a gin-shop in St. Giles, where some smuggler or smuggler's boy might not have been found who could have given the information. The want of it seemed so shameful, that one of the ministry, in that hurry and confusion of intellect which involve all his words and actions, said in parliament, "That he knew it; but that he wished to let his colleague have his own way;" forgetting that the difference cost the nation an army, and heedless that it cost her a disgrace. His colleague was angry, some say ashamed, and was determined to prove that, if he was unfit to direct a council, he was not unable to direct a pistol a far higher qualification in his country. The choice of the commander was more easily defended: no member of the cabinet blushed at that.

I have dwelt the longer on these characters, from the same principle as the sight, after rocks, ruins, and precipices, reposes upon a flat surface, though fen or quagmire.

Florentine Visiter. And I have thrown together my materials on Bonaparte as I caught them from him, not wishing to represent a whole where no whole existed. He was courtier and postilion, sage and assassin, quicker than the pen could trace the words. Never was he observed in a moment of highly bad or highly good humour, without expressing it by some boisterous sally of ill-breeding. Even those who had seen him daily, and knew him well, stood in astonishment sometimes at the discrepancy between his language and his office, at the disparity between the action of his hands and his embroidered mantle. Be it remembered that, if I have represented him as a thing not luminous in itself, I have forborne to represent him as one in which all light is absorbed, or upon which none can fall. He did both greater evil and greater good than all the other potentates of his time united: the larger part of the evil he did, they perpetuate; and nearly the whole of the good they abolish. Priestcraft and oligarchy, the two worst of curses, are restored through Europe, and royalets are only plucked forth from

under his coop to be encaged and hoodwinked by their old decoy-men.

Landor. You have taken up from one side and the other of this strange phenomenon the brighter parts and the darker, in just proportions:

Treis imbris torti radios, treis nubis aquosæ. Florentine Visiter. In the retreat from Moscow he provided only for his own security: the famished and wounded were without protection. Those (to the amount of forty thousand) who supplied the army with occasional food by distant and desperate excursions, were uninformed of its retreat: they perished to a man, and caused to perish by their disappearance a far greater number of their former comrades. The road was excavated in the snow: the army seemed a phantasmagoria: no sound of horses' feet was heard, no wheel of waggon or artillery, no voice of man. Regiment followed regiment in long and broken lines, between two files of soldiers the whole way. Some stood erect, some reclined a little, some had laid their arms beside them, some clasped them; all were dead. Several of these had slept in that position, but the greater part had been placed so to leave the more room; and not a few from every troop and detachment took their voluntary station among them. The barbarians, who at other seasons rush into battle with loud cries, rarely did it. Skins covered not their bodies only, but their faces; and, such was the intensity of cold, they reluctantly gave vent, from amid the spoils they had taken, to this first and most natural expression of their vengeance. Their spears, although many of soft wood, as the beech, the birch, the pine, remained unbroken, while the sword and sabre of the adversary cracked like ice. Feeble from inanition, inert from weariness, and somnolent from the frost that enthralled them, they sank into forgetfulness, with the Cossacks in pursuit and coming down on them, and even while they could yet discern, for they looked more frequently to that quarter, the more fortunate of their comrades marching home. The gay and lively Frenchman, to whom war had been sport and pastime, was now reduced to such apathy, that, in the midst of some kind speech which a friend was to communicate to those he loved the most tenderly, he paused from rigid drowsiness, and bade the messenger adieu. Some, it is reported (and what is unnatural is in such extremity not incredible), closed their eyes and threw down their muskets, while they could use them still, not from hope nor from fear, but part from indignation at their general, whose retreats had always been followed by the total ruin of his army; and part, remembering with what brave nations they had once fought gloriously, from the impossibility of defeating or resisting so barbarous and obscure an enemy. Napoleon moved on, surrounded by what guards were left to him, thinking more of Paris than of Moscow, more of the conscripts he could enroll than of the veterans he had left behind him. Yet this man lives, and Ferdinand has departed.