incense had been burned from his birth as to a deity. This was the chief source of his crimes. He wanted the sentiment of a common nature with his fellow-beings. He had no sympathies with his race. That feeling of brotherhood, which is developed in truly great souls with peculiar energy, and through which they give up themselves willing victims, joyful sacrifices, to the interests of mankind, was wholly unknown to him. His heart, amidst its wild beatings, never had a throb of disinterested love. The ties which bind man to man he broke asunder. The proper happiness of a man, which consists in the victory of moral energy and social affection over the selfish passions, he cast away for the lonely joy of a despot. With powers, which might have made him a glorious representative and minister of the beneficent Divinity, and with natural sensibilities which might have been exalted into sublime virtues, he chose to separate himself from his kind, to forego their love, esteem and gratitude, that he might become their gaze, their fear, their wonder; and, for this selfish, solitary good, parted with peace and imperishable renown. * * *

"This spirit of self-exaggeration wrought its own misery, and drew down upon him terrible punishments; and this it did by vitiating and perverting his high powers. First, it diseased his fine intellect, gave imagination the ascendancy over judgment, turned the inventiveness and fruitfulness of his mind into rash, impatient, restless energies, and thus precipitated him into projects, which, as the wisdom of his counsellors pronounced, were fraught with ruin. To a man, whose vanity took him out of the rank of human beings, no foundation for reasoning was left. All things seemed possible. His genius and his fortune were not to be bounded by the barriers which experience had assigned to human powers. The calmness of wisdom was denied him. He who was next to omnipotent in his own eyes, and who delighted to strike and astonish by sudden and conspicuous operations, could not brook delay, or wait for the slow operations of time. A work, which was to be

* * *

gradually matured by the joint agency of various causes, could not suit a man, who wanted to be felt as the great, perhaps only, cause, who wished to stamp his own agency in the most glaring characters on whatever he performed, and who hoped to rival by a sudden energy the steady and progressive works of nature. Hence so many of his projects were never completed, or only announced. They swelled however the tide of flattery, which ascribed to him the completion of what was not yet begun, whilst his restless spirit, rushing to new enterprises, forgot its pledges, and left the promised prodigies of his creative genius to exist only in the records of adulation. * *

*

"A still more fatal influence of the spirit of self-exaggeration which characterized Bonaparte remains to be named. It depraved, to an extraordinary degree, his moral sense. It did not obliterate altogether the ideas of duty; but, by a singular perversion, it impelled him to apply them exclusively to others. It never seemed to enter his thought, that he was subject to the great obligations of morality, which all others are called to respect. He was an exempted being. Whatever stood in his way to Empire, he was privileged to remove. Treaties only bound his enemies. No nation had rights but his own France. He claimed a monopoly in perfidy and violence. He was not naturally cruel, but when human life obstructed his progress, it was a lawful prey, and murder and assassination occasioned as little compunction as war. The most luminous exposition of his moral code, was given in counsels to the king of Holland. 'Never forget that, in the situation to which my political system and the interests of my Empire have called you, your first duty is towards ME, your second towards France. All your other duties, even those towards the people whom I have called you to govern, rank after these.' To his own mind he was the source and centre of duty. He was too peculiar and exalted to be touched by that vulgar stain called guilt. Crimes ceased to be such, when perpetrated by himself. Accordingly, he always

speaks of his transgressions as of indifferent acts. He never imagined that they tarnished his glory, or diminished his claim on the homage of the world. In St. Helena, though talking perpetually of himself, and often reviewing his guilty career, we are not aware that a single compunction escapes him. He speaks of his life as calmly as if it had been consecrated to duty and beneficence, whilst, in the same breath, he has the audacity to reproach unsparingly the faithlessness of almost every individual and nation with whom he had been connected. We doubt whether History furnishes so striking an example of the moral blindness and obduracy to which an unbounded egotism exposes and abandons the mind.”

CHAPTER III.

JOAN OF ARC.-GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS.-SOBIESKI. -WASHINGTON.-HEROES OF LA VENDÉE. TOUSSAINT.-WELLINGTON.

I HAVE been speaking hitherto of military Heroes; and as the fashion has been to lavish too much of praise on those who had the soldier's qualities in a pre-eminent degree, without due regard to the rights of the quarrel in which they fought, I have selected some from the long roll of Conquerors, ancient and modern, and have tried to bring them down to their proper level. But I should be sorry to write in a strain which would seem to confound warriors of every sort in one undistinguished mass. Fighting work must be done in a world where evil prevails so largely. Not yet, certainly, can we beat our swords into plough-shares. Our hearths and homes have to be kept safe; and thanks be to those who guard them, or are willing to guard them, at their own peril. Champions, too, are needed sometimes as leaders in some cause involving the rights of vast numbers, or the interests of many generations,—champions

in the field, besides those who plead with tongue or pen for the rights of humanity; and among the noblest men of the second rank, ranking below the "glorious company of the Apostles," and "the goodly fellowship of the Prophets," and "the noble army of Martyrs," but still ranking high above common mortals, have been the soldier-Heroes who have fought bravely and unselfishly against the world's oppressors. Some of these will be the subject of my next Chapter. From Leonidas, the Patriot-Hero of ancient story, to William Tell and Hofer, the names of these men have been the most spirit-stirring names in History; and I will select a few, not nobler than these and many more, but mixed up with greater events, so that my narrative may embrace both History and Biography.

JOAN OF ARC,

BORN A.D. 1412; DIED A.D. 1431.

Joan of Arc should stand at the head of this list, if I had not told her story rather fully in a former Volume.* We need not believe, as she did, in her “ Voices". We may be assured that

* Historical Sketches, First Series, including Joan of Arc, Caxton and the First Printers, Columbus and Luther. The volume is out of print, and will be reprinted, I hope, soon. My second volume contains St. Louis and Henry IV; and when that is out of print, I wish to put Joan of Arc in her right place, between the two French Kings.