[Solar-OpenOffice] ondemn h

Tue Aug 18 14:13:19 CEST 2009

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
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