CHAPTER II.
All the world's stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
From the year 1789, when an infuriated Parisian mob carried, on pikes, the heads of the murdered Delaunay, Governor of the Bastille, and De Flesselles, the Provost of Trades, till the fall of the curtain in 1815 on the Tableau of Waterloo, the European stage had been occupied, almost exclusively, by a succession of Tragedies. The Melo-drama followed, and when the great curtain rose on the 1st of January, 1819, the scene was peaceful. Most of the tragic actors having "strutted their little hour” and made their exit to return no more. A Bourbon sat, apparently secure on the French throne. George III. who had played a prominent part during the whole of that period still, nominally at least, swayed the the British sceptre. And the leading Tragedian, Napoleon, who had been compelled to retire from his favourite walk, stood on a rock in the South Atlantic Ocean, with his arms folded, looking across the wide waste of waters in the direction
