Chapter XVII: Part 17

Both monsters demand the same food; only, Robespierre adds “vicious men” to the ration of his monster, by way of extra and preferable game. Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to heaven, he can not avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet the streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he prances. Destructive instincts, long repressed by civilization, thus devoted to butchery, become aroused. His feline physiognomy, at first “that of a domestic cat, restless but mild, changes into the savage mien of the wild-cat, and next to the ferocious mien of the tiger. In the Constituent Assembly he speaks with a whine, in the convention he froths at the mouth.” The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-professor changes into the personal accent of furious passion; he hisses and grinds his teeth; sometimes, on a change of scene, he affects to shed tears. But his wildest outbursts are less alarming than his affected sensibility. The festering grudges, corrosive envies, and bitter schemings which have accumulated in his breast are astonishing. The gall vessels are full, and the extravasated gall overflows on the dead. He never tires of re-executing his guillotined adversaries, the Girondists, Chaumette, Hébert, and especially Danton, probably because Danton was the active agent in the revolution of which he was simply the incapable pedagogue; he vents his posthumous hatred on this still warm corpse in artful insinuations and obvious misrepresentations. Thus, inwardly corroded by the venom it distills, his physical machine gets out of order, like that of Marat, but with other symptoms. When speaking in the tribune “his hands crisp with a sort of nervous contraction”; sudden tremors agitate “his shoulders and neck, shaking him convulsively to and fro.” “His bilious complexion becomes livid,” his eyelids quiver under his spectacles, and how he looks! “Ah,” said a _Montagnard_, “you would have voted as we did on the 9th of Thermidor, had you seen his green eyeballs!” “Physically as well as morally,” he becomes a second Marat, suffering all the more because his delirium is not steady, and because his policy, being a moral one, forces him to exterminate on a grander scale.

But he is a discreet Marat, of a timid temperament, anxious, keeping his thoughts to himself, made for a schoolmaster or a pleader, but not for taking the lead or for governing, always acting hesitatingly, and ambitious to be rather the Pope, than the dictator of the revolution. He would prefer to remain a political Grandison; he keeps the mask on to the very last, not only to the public and to others, but to himself and in his inmost conscience. The mask, indeed, has adhered to his skin; he can no longer distinguish one from the other; never did impostor more carefully conceal intentions and acts under sophisms, and persuade himself that the mask was his face, and that in telling a lie, he told the truth.

When nature and history combine to produce a character they succeed better than even man’s imagination. Neither Moliere in his “Tartuffe,” nor Shakespeare in his “Richard III,” dared bring on the stage a hypocrite believing himself sincere, and a Cain that regarded himself as an Abel.

WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Son of the Earl of Chatham, born 1759, died 1806, and hardly less
distinguished than his father as a statesman and orator. He became
prime minister at the age of twenty-five, and showed a genius as
parliamentary leader which has never been surpassed and rarely
equaled, retaining him in power in spite of his feebleness in the
conduct of war and diplomacy. His great talents found their most
congenial field in the management of home affairs, being the
prototype of Mr. Gladstone in this respect. It is the younger
Pitt’s glory that with no able man in his own party to support him,
he held power so long unshaken by the incessant assaults of such
men as Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Lord North.]

When Parliament came together after the overthrow of the Coalition, the minister of twenty-five was master of England as no minister had been before. Even the king yielded to his sway, partly through gratitude for the triumph he had won for him over the Whigs, partly from a sense of the madness which was soon to strike him down, but still more from a gradual discovery that the triumph which he had won over his political rivals had been won, not to the profit of the crown, but of the nation at large. The Whigs, it was true, were broken, unpopular, and without a policy, while the Tories clung to the minister who had “saved the king.” But it was the support of a new political power that really gave his strength to the young minister. The sudden rise of English industry was pushing the manufacturer to the front; and all that the trading classes loved in Chatham, his nobleness of temper, his consciousness of power, his patriotism, his sympathy with a wider world than the world within the Parliament house, they saw in his son. He had little indeed of the poetic and imaginative side of Chatham’s genius, of his quick perception of what was just and what was possible, his far-reaching conceptions of national policy, his outlook into the future of the world.

Pitt’s flowing and sonorous commonplaces rang hollow beside the broken phrases which still make his father’s eloquence a living thing to Englishmen. On the other hand, he possessed some qualities in which Chatham was utterly wanting. His temper, though naturally ardent and sensitive, had been schooled in a proud self-command. His simplicity and good taste freed him from his father’s ostentation and extravagance. Diffuse and commonplace as his speeches seem, they were adapted as much by their very qualities of diffuseness and commonplace as by their lucidity and good sense to the intelligence of the middle classes whom Pitt felt to be his real audience. In his love of peace, his immense industry, his dispatch of business, his skill in debate, his knowledge of finance, he recalled Sir Robert Walpole; but he had virtues which Walpole never possessed, and he was free from Walpole’s worst defects. He was careless of personal gain. He was too proud to rule by corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room for any jealousy of subordinates. He was generous in his appreciation of youthful merits; and the “boys” he gathered round him, such as Canning and Lord Wellesley, rewarded his generosity by a devotion which death left untouched. With Walpole’s cynical inaction Pitt had no sympathy whatever. His policy from the first was one of active reform, and he faced every one of the problems, financial, constitutional, religious, from which Walpole had shrunk. Above all, he had none of Walpole’s scorn of his fellow-men. The noblest feature in his mind was its wide humanity.

His love for England was as deep and personal as his father’s love, but of the sympathy with English passion and English prejudice which had been at once his father’s weakness and strength he had not a trace. When Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham’s jealousy of France and his faith that she was the natural foe of England, Pitt answered nobly that “to suppose any nation can be unalterably the enemy of another is weak and childish.” The temper of the time and the larger sympathy of man with man, which especially marks the eighteenth century as a turning-point in the history of the human race, was everywhere bringing to the front a new order of statesmen, such as Turgot and Joseph II, whose characteristics were a love of mankind and a belief that as the happiness of the individual can only be secured by the general happiness of the community to which he belongs, so the welfare of individual nations can only be secured by the general welfare of the world. Of these Pitt was one. But he rose high above the rest in the consummate knowledge, and the practical force which he brought to the realization of his aims.

Pitt’s strength lay in finance; and he came forward at a time when the growth of English wealth made a knowledge of finance essential to a great minister. The progress of the nation was wonderful. Population more than doubled during the eighteenth century, and the advance of wealth was even greater than that of population. The war had added a hundred millions to the national debt, but the burden was hardly felt. The loss of America only increased the commerce with that country; and industry had begun that great career which was to make Britain the workshop of the world. Though England already stood in the first rank of commercial states at the accession of George III, her industrial life at home was mainly agricultural. The wool-trade had gradually established itself in Norfolk, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the counties of the southwest; while the manufacture of cotton was still almost limited to Manchester and Bolton, and remained so unimportant that in the middle of the eighteenth century the export of cotton goods hardly reached the value of fifty thousand a year. There was the same slow and steady progress in the linen trade of Belfast and Dundee and the silks of Spitalfields. The processes of manufacture were too rude to allow any large increase of production. It was only where a stream gave force to turn a mill-wheel that the wool-worker could establish his factory; and cotton was as yet spun by hand in the cottages, the “spinsters” of the family sitting with their distaffs round the weaver’s handloom. But had the processes of manufacture been more efficient, they would have been rendered useless by the want of a cheap and easy means of transport. The older main roads, which had lasted fairly through the middle ages, had broken down in later times before the growth of traffic and the increase of wagons and carriages.

The new lines of trade lay often along mere country lanes which had never been more than horse-tracks. Much of the woolen trade, therefore, had to be carried on by means of long trains of pack-horses; and in the case of yet heavier goods, such as coal, distribution was almost impracticable, save along the greater rivers or in districts accessible from the sea. A new era began when the engineering genius of Brindley joined Manchester with its port of Liverpool in 1767, by a canal which crossed the Irwell on a lofty aqueduct; the success of the experiment soon led to the universal introduction of water-carriage, and Great Britain was traversed in every direction by three thousand miles of navigable canals. At the same time a new importance was given to the coal which lay beneath the soil of England. The stores of iron which had lain side by side with it in the northern counties had lain there unworked through the scarcity of wood, which was looked upon as the only fuel by which it could be smelted.

In the middle of the eighteenth century a process for smelting iron with coal turned out to be effective; and the whole aspect of the iron trade was at once revolutionized. Iron was to become the working material of the modern world; and it is its production of iron which more than all else has placed England at the head of industrial Europe. The value of coal as a means of producing mechanical force was revealed in the discovery by which Watt in 1765 transformed the steam-engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instrument which human industry has ever had at its command. The invention came at a moment when the existing supply of manual labor could no longer cope with the demands of the manufacturers. Three successive inventions in twelve years, that of the spinning-jenny in 1764 by the weaver Hargreaves, of the spinning-machine in 1768 by the barber Arkwright, of the “mule” by the weaver Crompton in 1776, were followed by the discovery of the power-loom. But these would have been comparatively useless had it not been for the revelation of a new and inexhaustible labor-force in the steam-engine. It was the combination of such a force with such means of applying it that enabled Britain during the terrible years of her struggle with France and Napoleon to all but monopolize the woolen and cotton trades, and raised her into the greatest manufacturing country that the world had seen.

To deal wisely with such a growth required a knowledge of the laws of wealth which would have been impossible at an earlier time. But it had become possible in the days of Pitt. If books are to be measured by the effect which they have produced on the fortunes of mankind the “Wealth of Nations” must rank among the greatest of books. Its author was Adam Smith, an Oxford scholar and a professor at Glasgow. Labor, he contended, was the one source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labor, by suffering the worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, that the public wealth would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labor into artificial channels, to shape by laws the course of commerce, to promote special branches of industry in particular countries, or to fix the character of the intercourse between one country and another, is not only a wrong to the worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful to the wealth of a state. The book was published in 1776, at the opening of the American war, and studied by Pitt during his career as an undergraduate at Cambridge. From that time he owned Adam Smith for his master. He had hardly become minister before he took the principles of the “Wealth of Nations” as the groundwork of his policy. The ten earlier years of his rule marked a new point of departure in English statesmanship. Pitt was the first English minister who really grasped the part which industry was to play in promoting the welfare of the world. He was not only a peace minister and a financier, as Walpole had been, but a statesman who saw that the best security for peace lay in the freedom and widening of commercial intercourse between nations; that public economy not only lessened the general burdens but left additional capital in the hands of industry; and that finance might be turned from a mere means of raising revenue into a powerful engine of political and social improvement.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

BY LOUIS ADOLPHE THIERS.

[Emperor of France, born in Corsica 1769, died a prisoner on the
island of St. Helena in 1821. Educated at the military schools of
Brienne and Paris, Napoleon became a sous-lieutenant of artillery
at the age of sixteen. He had become a captain when the revolution
reached its height in the Reign of Terror. Though never an actor in
the horrors of Jacobin rule, he was supposed to have been a warm
friend of Robespierre. After the fall of the terrorists Napoleon
took the side of the convention, and at the head of its troops
dispersed the infuriated mob of Montagnards with the famous “whiff
of grapeshot” which blew up the last remains of the party of 1793.
After his marriage with Josephine Beauharnais, the young soldier
was appointed to the command of the army of Italy. In two years
Napoleon, in a series of splendid battles, annihilated four
Austrian armies, liberated Italy, and forced Austria to a
humiliating peace. After the failure of the Egyptian expedition
Napoleon returned to France, and by the _coup d’état_ of December,
1799, attained supreme power as first consul. The second Italian
campaign of 1800 was no less brilliant than the first, culminating
in the battle of Marengo. In 1802 Napoleon was made life-consul,
“the swelling prologue of the imperial theme,” for nine months
later he assumed the title of emperor, and was crowned by Pope Pius
VII at Notre Dame. The year 1812 was the beginning of the disasters
which finally dethroned him. The terrible Russian campaign, and the
utter defeat of his arms in Spain by Lord Wellesley, afterward Duke
of Wellington, marked a change in the clock of destiny. The great
European coalition of 1813 brought overwhelming forces against him,
resulting in the great battle of Dresden, lasting three
days--October 16th, 17th, and 18th--which broke the French power.
The allies entered Paris, March 31, 1814, and Napoleon abdicated on
April 11th. His exile in Elba lasted less than ten months, and on
his return to France two hundred thousand men rallied to him at his
call. The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 15, 1815, ended in his
overwhelming defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington,
assisted by Marshal Blücher. Napoleon’s second abdication was
followed by his surrender to the English, and his exile to St.
Helena for the rest of his life.]

Napoleon was endowed by nature with a clear, penetrating, vast, comprehensive, and peculiarly active mind, nor had he less decision of character than clearness of intellect. He always seized at once the decisive argument, in battle the most effective movement. To conceive, resolve, and perform were with him but one indivisible act, so wonderful was his rapidity, that not a moment was spent in reflection between perception and action. Any obstacle presented to such a mind by a trifling objection, by indolence, weakness, or disaffection, served but to cause his anger to spring forth and cover you with its foam. Had he chosen some civil profession where success can only be attained by persuading men and winning them over, he might have endeavored to subdue or moderate his fiery temperament, but flung into the career of arms, and endowed with the sovereign faculty of seeing the surest means of conquest at a glance, he became at one bound the ruler of Italy, at a second the master of the French Republic, at a third the sovereign of Europe.

What wonder that a nature formed so impetuous by God should become more so from success; what wonder if he were abrupt, violent, domineering, and unbending in his resolutions! If apart from the battle-field he exercised that tact so necessary in civil business, it was in the council of state, though even there he decided questions with a sagacity and clearness of judgment that astonished and subdued his hearers, except on some few occasions when he was misled for a moment by passion or want of sufficient knowledge of the subject under discussion. Both nature and circumstances combined to make him the most despotic and impetuous of men.

In contemplating his career, it does not appear that this fiery, despotic nature revealed itself at once or altogether. In his youth he was lean, taciturn, and even sad--sad from concentrated ambition that feeds upon itself until it finds an outlet and attains the object of its desires. As a young man he was sometimes rude, morose, until becoming the object of universal admiration he became more open, calm, and communicative--lost the meagerness that made his countenance so expressive, and, as one may say, unfolded himself. Consul for life, emperor, conqueror at Marengo and Austerlitz, still exercising some little restraint on himself, he seemed to have reached the apogee of his moral existence; and his figure, then moderately stout, was radiant with regular and manly beauty. But soon, when nations submitted and sovereigns bowed before him, he was no longer restrained by respect for man or even for nature. He dared, attempted all things; spoke without restraint; was gay, familiar, and often intemperate in language. His moral and physical nature became more developed, nor did his extreme stoutness diminish his Olympian beauty; his fuller countenance still preserved the eagle glance; and when descending from his accustomed height from which he excited admiration, fear, and hatred, he became merry, familiar, and almost vulgar, he could resume his dignity in a moment, for he was able to descend without demeaning himself. And when at length, in advancing life, he is supposed to be less active or less daring, because of his increasing _embonpoint_, or because Fortune had ceased to smile on him, he bounds more impetuously than ever on his charger, and shows that for his ardent mind matter is no burden, misfortune no restraint.

Such were the successive developments of this extraordinary nature. It is not easy to estimate Napoleon’s moral qualities, for it is rather difficult to discover goodness in a soldier who was continually strewing the earth with dead, or friendship in a man who never knew an equal, or probity in a potentate in whose power were the riches of the universe. Still, though an exception to all ordinary rules, we may occasionally catch some traits of the moral physiognomy of this extraordinary man.

In all things promptness was his distinctive characteristic. He would become angry, but would recover his calmness with wonderful facility, almost ashamed of his excitement, laughing at it if he could do so without compromising his dignity, and would again address with affectionate words or gestures the officer he had overpowered by his burst of passion. His anger was sometimes affected for the purpose of intimidating subalterns who neglected their duty. When real, his displeasure passed like a flash of lightning; when affected, it lasted as long as it was needed. When he was no longer obliged to command, restrain, or impel men, he became gentle, simple, and just, just as every man of great mind is who understands human nature, and appreciates and pardons its weaknesses because he knows that they are inevitable. At St. Helena, deprived of all external prestige, his power departed, without any other ascendant over his companions than that derived from his intellect and disposition, Napoleon ruled them with absolute sway, won them by unchanging amiability; and that to such a degree that having feared him for the greater part of their lives, they ended by loving him for the remainder. On the battle-field he had acquired an insensibility that was almost fearful; he could behold unmoved the ground covered with a hundred thousand lifeless bodies, for none had ever caused so much human blood to flow as he.

This insensibility was, so to speak, a consequence of his profession. Often in the evening he would ride over the battle-field, which in the morning he had strewed with all the horrors of war, to see that the wounded were removed, a proceeding that might be the result of policy, but was not; and he frequently sprang from his horse to assure himself whether in an apparently lifeless body the vital spark did not still linger. At Wagram he saw a fine young man, in the uniform of the cuirassiers, lying on the ground with his face covered with clotted blood; he sprang at once from his horse, supported the head of the wounded youth on his knee, restored him by the aid of some spirituous remedy, and said, smiling: “He will recover, it is one more saved!” These are no proofs of want of feeling.

In everything connected with finance he was almost avaricious, disputing even about a centime, while he would give millions to his friends, servants, or the poor. Having discovered that a distinguished _savant_ who had accompanied him to Egypt was in embarrassed circumstances, he sent him a large sum, blaming him at the same time for not having told him of his position. In 1813, having expended all his ready money, and learning that a lady of high birth, who had once been very rich, was in want of the necessaries of life, he immediately appointed her a pension of twenty-four thousand francs, as much as fifty thousand at the present time, and being told that she was eighty-four years of age, “Poor woman,” he said, “let her be paid four years in advance.” These, we must repeat, are no indications of want of kindness of disposition.

Having but little time to devote to private friendships, removed from them by his superiority to other men, but still, under the influence of time and habit, he did become attached to some, so strongly attached as to be indulgent even to weakness to those he loved. This was the case with regard to his relatives, whose pretensions often provoked his anger; yet, seeing them annoyed, he relented, and to gratify them, often did what he knew to be unwise. Although the admiration he had felt for the Empress Josephine passed away with time, and though she had, by many thoughtless acts, lowered herself in the esteem he always entertained for her, he had for her, even after his divorce, the most profound affection. He wept for Duroc, but in secret, as though it were a weakness.

As to his probity, we know not by what standard to estimate such a quality in a man who from the very commencement of his public career had immense riches at his command. When he became commander-in-chief of the army in Italy and was master of all the wealth of the country, he first supplied his army abundantly, and then sent assistance to the army on the Rhine, reserving nothing for himself, or at most only a sum sufficient to purchase a small house, Rue de la Victoire, a purchase for which one year’s pay would have sufficed; and had he died in Egypt, his widow would have been left destitute. Was this the result of pride, disdain of vulgar enjoyments, or honesty? Perhaps there was a little of all in this forbearance, which was not unexampled among our generals, though certainly as rare then as it has ever been. He punished dishonesty with extreme severity, which might be attributed to his love of order; but, what was still better, and seemed to indicate that he possessed the quality of honesty himself, was the positive affection he showed for honest people, carried so far as to take keen pleasure in their society.

Still this man, whom God had made so great and so good, was not a virtuous man, for virtue consists in a fixed idea of duty, to which all our inclinations, all our desires, moral and physical, must be subjected, and which could not be the case with one who, of all that ever lived, put least restraint upon his passions. But if wholly deficient in what is abstractly understood as virtue, he possessed certain special virtues, particularly those of a warrior and statesman. He was temperate, not prone to sensual gratifications, and, it not exactly chaste he was not a libertine, never, except on occasions of ceremony, remained more than a few minutes at table; he slept on a hard bed though his constitution was rather weak than strong, bore, without even perceiving it, an amount of fatigue that would have exhausted the most vigorous soldiers; and was capable of prodigious exertion when mentally occupied with some great undertaking.

He did more than brave danger, he seemed unconscious of its existence, and was ever to be found wherever he was needed to see, direct, or command. Such was his character as a soldier; as a general he was not inferior.

Never had the cares of a vast military command been borne with more coolness, vigor, or presence of mind. If he were occasionally excited or angry, the officers who knew him best said that all _was going on well_. When the danger became serious, he was calm, mild, encouraging, not wishing to add the excitement attendant on his displeasure to that which naturally arose from the circumstances; he remained perfectly calm, a power acquired by the habit of restraining his emotions in great emergencies, and, calculating the extent of the danger, turning it aside, and thus triumphing over fortune. Formed for great emergencies and familiarized by habit to every species of peril, he stood by, in 1814, a calm spectator of the suicidal destruction of his own power, a destruction achieved by his ambition; and still he hoped when all around despaired, because he perceived resources undivined by anybody else, and under all vicissitudes, soaring on the wings of genius above the shock of circumstances, and with the resignation of a self-judged mind he accepted the deserved punishment of his faults.

Such, in our opinion, was this man, so strange, so self-contradicting, so many-sided. If among the principal traits of his character there is one more prominent than the rest, it is a species of moral intemperance. A prodigy of genius and passion, flung into the chaos of a revolution, his nature unfolds and develops itself therein. He masters that wild confusion, replaces it by his own presence, and displays the energy, audacity, and fickleness of that which he replaced. Succeeding to men who stopped at nothing, either in virtue or crime, in heroism or cruelty, surrounded by men who laid no restraints on their passions, he laid none on his; they wished to convert the world into a universal republic, he would have it an equally boundless monarchy; they turned everything into chaos, he formed an almost tyrannical unity; they disorganized everything, he re-established order; they defied sovereigns, he dethroned them; they slaughtered men on the scaffold, he on the battle-field, where blood was shrouded in glory. He immolated more human beings than did any Asiatic conqueror, and within the narrow precincts of Europe, peopled with opposing nations, he conquered a greater space of territory than Tamerlane or Genghis Khan amid the deserts of Asia.

It was reserved for the French revolution, destined to change the aspect of European society, to produce a man who would fix the attention of the world as powerfully as Charlemagne, Cæsar, Hannibal, and Alexander. He possessed every qualification that could strike, attract, and fix the attention of mankind, whether we consider the greatness of the part he was destined to perform, the vastness of the political convulsions he caused, the splendor, extent, and profundity of his genius, or his majestic gravity of thought. This son of a Corsican gentleman, who received the gratuitous military education that ancient royalty bestowed on the sons of the poor nobility, had scarcely left school when in a sanguinary tumult he obtained the rank of commander-in-chief, then left the Parisian army for that of Italy, conquered that country in a month, successively destroyed all the forces of the European coalition, wrested from them the peace of Campo-Formio, and then becoming too formidable to stand beside the government of the republic, he went to seek a new destiny in the East, passed through the English fleet with five hundred ships, conquered Egypt at a stride, then thought of following Alexander’s footsteps in the conquest of India. But suddenly recalled to the West by the renewal of the European war, after having attempted to imitate Alexander, he imitated and equaled Hannibal in crossing the Alps, again overpowered the coalition, and compelled it to accept the peace of Luneville, and at thirty years of age this son of a poor Corsican nobleman had already run through a most extraordinary career.

Become pacific for a while, he by his laws laid the basis of modern society; but again yielding to the impulses of his restless genius, he once more attacked Europe, vanquished her in three battles--Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland--set up and threw down kingdoms, placed the crown of Charlemagne on his head; and when kings came to offer him their daughters, chose the descendant of the Cæsars, who presented him with a son that seemed destined to wear the most brilliant crown in the universe. He advanced from Cadiz to Moscow, where he was subjected to the greatest catastrophe on record, rose again, but was again defeated, and confined in a small island, from which he emerged with a few hundred faithful soldiers, recovered the crown of France in twenty days, struggled again against exasperated Europe, sank for the last time at Waterloo, and having sustained greater wars than those of the Roman Empire, went--he, the child of a Mediterranean isle--to die on an island in the ocean, bound like Prometheus by the fear and hatred of kings to a rock.

This son of a poor Corsican nobleman has indeed played in the world the parts of Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, and Charlemagne! He possessed as much genius as the greatest among them; acquired as much fame as the most celebrated, and unfortunately shed more blood than any of them. In a moral point of view, he is inferior to the best of these great men but superior to the worst. His ambition was not as futile as that of Alexander, nor as depraved as that of Cæsar, but it was not as respectable as Hannibal’s, who sacrificed himself to save his country the misfortune of being conquered. His ambition was that usual with conquerors who seek to rule after having aggrandized their native land. Still he loved France and cherished her glory as dearly as his own.

As a ruler he sought what was right, but sought it as a despot, nor did he pursue it with the consistency or religious perseverance of Charlemagne. In variety of talents he was inferior to Cæsar, who, being compelled to win over his fellow-citizens before ruling them, had to learn how to persuade as well as how to fight, and could speak, write, and act with a certain simple majesty. Napoleon, on the other hand, having acquired power by warfare, had no need of oratory, nor possibly, though endowed with natural eloquence, could he ever have acquired it, since he never would have taken the trouble of patiently analyzing his thought in presence of a deliberative assembly. He could write as he thought, with force and dignity, but he was sometimes a little declamatory like his mother, the French revolution; he argued with more force than Cæsar, but could not narrate with his extreme simplicity or exquisite taste. He was inferior to the Roman dictator in the variety of his talents, but superior as a general, both by his peculiar military genius and by the daring profundity and inexhaustible fertility of his plans, in which he had but one equal or superior (which we can not decide)--Hannibal; for he was as daring, as prudent, as subtle, as inventive, as terrible, and as obstinate as the Carthaginian general, with one advantage of living at a later period. Succeeding to Hannibal, Cæsar, the Nassaus, Gustavus Adolphus, Condé, Turenne, and Frederick, he brought military art to its ultimate perfection. God alone can estimate the respective merits of such men; all we can do is to sketch some prominent traits of their wonderful characters.

DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

BY ARCHIBALD ALISON.

[Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, third son of the Earl of
Mornington, born 1769, died 1852. Previous to taking command of the
British armies in Spain against the French, Sir Arthur Wellesley
had achieved great distinction and the rank of major-general in
India. Shortly after his appointment to the Spanish command as
lieutenant-general in 1808, he was raised to the peerage as
Viscount Wellington; and his brilliant success against Napoleon’s
most eminent marshals stamped him as one of the first soldiers of
the age. In 1815 Wellington was placed at the head of the English
forces and their allies, to meet Napoleon in that last convulsive
struggle which ended with the battle of Waterloo. Made
field-marshal and duke for his eminent services, Wellington
afterward signalized his capacity for civil administration as
little inferior to his military skill, and as premier displayed the
most wise and liberal statesmanship.]

The name of no commander in the long array of British greatness will occupy so large a space in the annals of the world as that of Wellington; and yet there are few whose public characters possess, with so many excellences, so simple and unblemished a complexion. It is to the purity and elevation of his principles in every public situation that this enviable distinction is to be ascribed. Intrusted early in life with high command, and subjected from the first to serious responsibility, he possessed that singleness of heart and integrity of purpose which, even more than talent or audacity, are the foundations of true and moral courage, and the only pure path to public greatness; a sense of duty, a feeling of honor, a generous patriotism, a forgetfulness of self, constituted the spring of all his actions.

He was ambitious, but it was to serve his king and country only; fearless, because his whole heart was wound up in these noble objects; disinterested, because the enriching of himself or his family never for a moment crossed his mind; insensible to private fame when it interfered with public duty, indifferent to popular obloquy when it arose from rectitude of conduct. Like the Roman patriot, he wished rather to be than appear deserving. “Esse quam bonus malebat, ita quo minus gloriam petebat eo magis adsequebatur.” Greatness was forced upon him, both in military and political life, rather because he was felt to be worthiest, than because he desired to be the first; he was the architect of his own fortune, but he became so almost unconsciously, while solely engrossed in constructing that of his country. He has left undone many things, as a soldier, which might have added to his fame, and done many things, as a statesman, which were fatal to his power; but he omitted the first because they would have endangered his country, and committed the second because he felt them to be essential to its salvation.

It is the honor of England, and of human nature, that such a man should have risen at such a time to the rule of her armies and her councils; but he experienced with Themistocles and Scipio Africanus the mutable tenure of popular applause and the base ingratitude of those whom he had saved. Having triumphed over the arms of the threatened tyrant, he was equally immovable in the presence of the insane citizens; and it is hard to say whether his greatness appeared most when he struck down the conqueror of Europe on the field of Waterloo, or was himself with difficulty rescued from death on its anniversary, eighteen years afterward, in the streets of London.

A constant recollection of these circumstances, and of the peculiar and very difficult task which was committed to his charge, is necessary in forming a correct estimate of the Duke of Wellington’s military achievements. The brilliancy of his course is well known; an unbroken series of triumphs from Vimiero to Toulouse; the entire expulsion of the French from the Peninsula; the planting of the British standard in the heart of France; the successive defeat of those veteran marshals who had so long conquered in every country of Europe; the overthrow of Waterloo; the hurling of Napoleon from his throne; and the termination, in one day, of the military empire founded on twenty years of conquest. But these results, great and imperishable as they are, convey no adequate idea, either of the difficulties with which Wellington had to contend, or of the merit due to his transcendent exertions. With an army seldom superior in number to a single corps of the French marshals; with troops dispirited by recent disasters, and wholly unaided by practical experience; without any compulsory law to recruit his ranks, or any strong national passion for war to supply its wants, he was called on to combat successively vast armies, composed, in great part, of veteran soldiers, perpetually filled by the terrible powers of the conscription, headed by the chiefs who, risen from the ranks, and practically acquainted with the duties of war in all its grades, had fought their way from the grenadier’s musket to the marshal’s baton, and were followed by men who, trained in the same school, were animated by the same ambition.

Still more, he was the general of a nation in which the chivalrous and mercantile qualities are strongly blended together; which, justly proud of its historic glory, is unreasonably jealous of its military expenditure; which, covetous beyond measure of warlike renown, is ruinously impatient of pacific preparation; which starves its establishment when danger is over, and yet frets at defeat when its terrors are present; which dreams, in war, of Cressy and Agincourt, and ruminates, in peace, on economic reduction.

He combated at the head of an alliance formed of heterogeneous states, composed of discordant materials, in which ancient animosities and religious divisions were imperfectly suppressed by recent fervor or present danger; in which corruption often paralyzed the arm of patriotism, and jealousy withheld the resources of power. He acted under the direction of a ministry which, albeit zealous and active, was alike inexperienced in hostility and unskilled in combinations; in presence of an opposition which, powerful in eloquence, supported by faction, was prejudiced against the war, and indefatigable to arrest it; for the interests of a people, who, although ardent in the cause and enthusiastic in its support, were impatient of disaster and prone to depression, and whose military resources, how great soever, were dissipated in the protection of a colonial empire which encircled the earth.

Nothing but the most consummate prudence, as well as ability in conduct, could with such means have achieved victory over such an enemy, and the character of Wellington was singularly fitted for the task. Capable, when the occasion required or opportunity was afforded, of the most daring enterprises, he was yet cautious and wary in his general conduct; prodigal of his own labor, regardless of his own person, he was avaricious only of the blood of his soldiers. Endowed by Nature with an indomitable soul, a constitution of iron, he possessed that tenacity of purpose and indefatigable activity which is ever necessary to great achievements; prudent in council, sagacious in design, he was yet prompt and decided in action. No general ever revolved the probable dangers of an enterprise more anxiously before undertaking it, none possessed in a higher degree the eagle eye, the arm of steel, necessary to carry it into execution.

By the steady application of these rare qualities he was enabled to raise the British military force from an unworthy state of depression to an unparalleled pitch of glory; to educate, in presence of the enemy, not only his soldiers in the field, but his rulers in the cabinet; to silence, by avoiding disaster, the clamor of his enemies; to strengthen, by progressive success, the ascendency of his friends; to augment, by the exhibition of its results, the energy of the government; to rouse, by deeds of glory, the enthusiasm of the people.

Skillfully seizing the opportunity of victory, he studiously avoided the chances of defeat; aware that a single disaster would at once endanger his prospects, discourage his countrymen, and strengthen his opponents, he was content to forego many opportunities of earning fame, and stifle many desires to grasp at glory; magnanimously checking the aspirations of genius, he trusted for ultimate success rather to perseverance in a wise, than audacity in a daring course. He thus succeeded during six successive campaigns, with a comparatively inconsiderable army, in maintaining his ground against the vast and veteran forces of Napoleon, in defeating successively all his marshals, baffling successively all his enterprises, and finally rousing such an enthusiastic spirit in the British Empire as enabled its Government to put forth its immense resources on a scale worthy of its present greatness and ancient renown, and terminate a contest of twenty years by planting the English standard on the walls of Paris.

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