against them, but such as are generally of a fugitive nature, dependent on this or that set of Ministers, and unconnected with abstract theories. But besides these parties in the case of Napoleon, the opinion of him has been connected, immediately or remotely, with all sorts of previous parties, and those of the most new and violent description. The French revolution, more or less, threw every body upon thinking for himself; the violent action with which it was accompanied inflamed the natural theoretical violence of the spectators; the most abstract and speculative notions, that used to be confined to the closet, and treated on all hands as matters of private and quiet difference, became identified with the character and success of those that were acting out in the world; and political partizanship assumed all the soreness and fierceness of a theological controversy, in which difference was nothing less than damnation. Bonaparte, in rising out of the French revolution, and attracting to himself the great and almost sole attention of Europe, drew with it also the violence of all its speculative likings or dislikings, and became the object on which all parties vented their respective notions, even on the remotest questions with which his situation was connected. It was thus he became admirable or detestable, according as the self-love of the disputants found their creed concerned in his fortunes. If he gave a blow to kings, no matter for what purpose, all the speculative republicans, or democrats, or objectors to existing things in any way, set up a shout of applause, and were inclined to think personally well of him:-if he gave a blow to liberty, no matter with how royal a hand, all the royalists, or aristocrats, or defenders of things as they used to be, exulted over the accomplishment of their prophecies, and denounced in him the natural tyranny of jacobinism. By degrees, the feelings of both sides became almost transferred from their first subject of dispute to his personal proceedings and character, and nothing but the self-love of the old questions remained. This however remained in full force; and here lies the secret of all the extremes to which admiration and hatred have gone respecting him. People would think any thing of him, for or against, according as he annoyed their old friends or antagonists;-the liberty men learnt to forgive him his attacks on liberty for the sake of his humiliation of its opponents; while the Courtiers, for the same reason, would not put up even with his revival of courts;—the former agreed to overlook in him the usual vices of conquerors; the latter could see in him none of their virtues ;-the one class reprobated and cried out against the hereditary sovereigns, for doing the very same things which they glossed over in him; the other reprobated and cried out against him for doing what they glossed over in the hereditary sovereigns:-in short, the whole previous question, as to any direct treatment and consistency, became a mere matter of jargon and forgetfulness before the piques and passions to which his personal importance gave rise; and all parties were content, at the expense of the principles they had originally set out with, to indulge their respective revenges;-the liberty men, to see the old despots punished without caring much for the new; -the hereditary men, to see them stand their ground at any rate, without any longer thinking it necessary to limit them;-and those, who in the progress of the dispute had gone from one extreme to the other, and of course were the most violent, to see confusion brought upon the heads of their old friends, more especially those who gave them the most galling sense of their infirmities, the moderate part of them. The very best, as well as worst of these people, have for years past been doing nothing but indulging their egotism, while they flattered themselves with having an ardour for the right. It was not wrong principles that enraged them, but the mere fact of contradiction; otherwise they would oftener have denounced the former in their friends, and put up with the latter from their antagonists; but contradiction has invariably made them furious; while to vices of all sorts, in their own party, they have been equally as considerate. Heaven save us from these gentry over their wine and walnuts! "In the mean time, Bonaparte had not the twentieth part to do with all this, of what was supposed. He had become indeed an apostate from liberty, and so far the lovers of freedom ought to have denounced him; and on the other hand, he had fallen in with the old royal habits and distinctions, and so far the other party should have liked him; but very few indeed of the one did denounce him; and none of the others, that we are aware of, gave him the smallest approbation;-the latter perhaps could less afford to make any concession. But after all, he was not by a twentieth part so much an apostate from liberty, or a compromiser with despotism, as he was a regularly bred soldier, full of the enthusiasm of the ancient conquerors, and anxious above all things to tread in their steps. He was a soldier by early education; liberty helped him on as a soldier; a soldier he remained when on the throne; a soldier, and chiefly to be criticised as such, both in his right actions and his wrong, he continued to the last. Those therefore who praised him for humiliating kings, and those who denounced him for being the child and champion of jacobinism,' were, in the main, pretty nearly equal in their mistake; it was as a soldier and a conqueror that he was to be considered,— as a man, who would improve the condition of society in his progress as far as it could contribute to his glory, who probably, if he ever thought at all of vindicating his actions to himself, thought himself an instrument in the hands of Providence for that purpose, but who at the same time held liberty and tyranny to be very subordinate things, and looked principally and almost entirely to the enjoyment of the science of war, to the admiration f his contemporaries, and to the leaving behind him a name like the Cæsars and Alexanders. It is as idle to call such a man personally to account, or to praise him, for the political features of his age, as it is to affect to consider him as responsible for those particular actions against individuals, which in other princes of his cast have been sunk in their sovereign rank. Those who praise the Cæsars and Alexanders may praise him also; and it is those only who take their stand impartially and at all times against greatness in that shape, that have a right to reproach him. "How such men ought to be considered is another question. The philosophy that endeavours to go back to first causes will see in them perhaps the habits and excuses of common humanity; -the more practical philosophy of life, if it is generously disposed, will, we think, take part against them, at least in their prosperity; but then at all times it will do its best to be consistent and impartial, and not reproach one faulty individual, to the impunity of others, perhaps even while praising them. Those who set about to excuse men of violence should act rather like Montaigne than Boileau,-excuse the whole of them at once, or pick out the bright side of some eminent character, whom it is no interest to praise, rather than do away all the decency of their objections by adulating one sort of conquerors, and perhaps abusing their betters. Boileau, who flattered Louis the 14th in the last style of abject servility, undertook at the same time, when he got into his spirit of theme writing, to represent Alexander as a madman or highwayman, and to say that he would have been a fit subject for the hands of a Lieutenant of Police. We have seen writers, with nothing, it is true, of Boileau but the servility, flattering living monarchs in the same way, and saying the same pretty little patibulary things of Napoleon. Montaigne, on the other hand, a man to whom Boileau, with all his wit and smart verses, was a school-boy,-does not appear to have spoken a flattering untruth of any living Prince of his time; yet he gives a very different character of Alexander, and goes indeed a remarkable length in excusing him. Montaigne referring to the first causes above-mentioned, probably wished to make the best of a human being, who had excited his interest, and who was certainly distinguished in many things above his fellows;-Boileau thought that with a still greater philosophy, he stripped him of his pretensions, and yet he went and clothed his own monarch with them instead. For our parts, with all our reverence for the former's wisdom, we agree neither with the one nor the other:-at least we do not think Alexander so distinguished from other men in natural greatness, and are not inclined to palliate his faults except in common with those of his fellow-creatures; but on the other hand, we think him no more a highwayman than Louis the 14th, or any other princely robber, and would neither hang him in effigy, nor Bonaparte in reality, unless we could prevail on ourselves to stretch the noose also to the Usurpers of Poland, Saxony, Lombardy, Finland, and Norway." THE LITTLE WANDERER. LOST and bewilder'd in the storm, Without a hut to keep her warm. Hark! how the thunder rolls above; Darts terror thro' the peaceful grove: No mother now with tender care, To take me on her knee; Kind Heaven! to thee I lowly bend, THE BAY OF BISCAY 0. The night both drear and dark, Till next day, There she lay, In the bay of Biscay O! Now dash'd upon the billow, Till the day, In the bay of Biscay O! |