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A SHORT HISTORY OF NAPOLEON I.
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the literature of St. Helena, and of his recorded talk. The disposition common in France and Germany to reject the Mémorial seems to have affected him. We miss the catena of characteristic utterances with which Napoleon struck fire, from the night at Cherasco when he assured the Piedmontese negotiators that he might lose battles but would never lose minutes, down to the last dictation in which he calls history the only true philosophy." The gross and graceless tyrant of these pages is not the man who said : "Je ne suis pas un homme, mais une chose."

Whilst the republican New Englander deplores and despises the triumph of Castlereagh and Metternich, it is the note of the Cambridge history not only to judge their cause just, but their enemy infamous, and to dwell on the slaughter of Jaffa, the bequest to Cantillon, and the execution of Enghien. If we must judge a man's intellect by the highest level which he reaches, and his morality by the lowest, this is the deciding test of Napoleon's character, and fixes his place in the seventh circle. His action at Jaffa was not worse than the action of an English worthy to whom even recent opinion has been very lenient. The disgraceful codicil only shows that the testator died unreconciled, and that the companion who, on hearing him speak of Providence, reported to Sir Hudson Lowe that his captive was breaking, understood the real habits of his mind. It raises perhaps a doubt whether it was in derision that he whispered at Weimar a question as to the existence of Christ, which drew from Wieland the prophetic answer that men might as well deny the existence of Napoleon. But there is nothing in the Vincennes tragedy to mitigate the bare guilt of murder, or to turn away the historian's wrath ; and his judgment stands, if the particulars are open to dispute. lie makes a point by saying that the duke was tried and shot for having borne arms against his country, and was not even charged with complicity in the plot. The sixth article of accusation was : "d'être l'un des fauteurs et complices de la conspiration tramée par