R summons shall be uttered to the latent powers of mankind, from some similar crisis of good and evil. The eloquence of Burke, Pitt, Fox, and a crowd of their followers, in the senate of England, and the almost fiendish vividness of the republican oratory, have remained without equals, and almost without imitators--the brilliancy of French soldiership, in a war which swept Europe with the swiftness and the devastation of a flight of locusts--the British campaigns of the Peninsula, those most consummate displays of fortitude and decision, of the science which baffles an enemy, and of the bravery which crushes him--will be lessons to the soldier in every period to come. But the foremost figure of the great history-piece of revolution, was the man, of whose latter hours we are now contemplating. Napoleon may not have been the ablest statesman, or the most scientific soldier, or the most resistless conqueror, or the most magnificent monarch of mankind--but what man of his day so closely combined all those characters, and was so distinguished in them all? It is idle to call him the child of chance--it is false to call his power the creation of opportunity--it is trifling with the common understanding of man, to doubt his genius. He was one of those few men, who are formed to guide great changes in the affairs of nations. The celebrity of his early career, and the support given to him by the disturbances of France, are nothing in the consideration of the philosopher; or perhaps they but separate him more widely from the course of things, and assimilate him more essentially with those resistless influences of nature, which, rising from we know not what, and operating we know not how, execute the penalties of Heaven:--those moral pestilences which, like the physical, springing from some spot of obscurity, and conveyed by the contact of the obscure, suddenly expand into universal contagion, and lay waste the mind of nations. In the earlier volumes of the Journal of Count Montholon, the assistance of Las Cases was used to collect the imperial _dicta_. But on the baron's being sent away from St Helena--an object which he appears to have sought with all the eagerness of one determined to make his escape, yet equally resolved on turning that escape into a subject of compla
