Other women, indeed, might have struggled far better against the adverse conditions of an unsuitable marriage and have borne themselves far better amid its worst trials than the clever, impulsive, light-hearted, light-headed Caroline Amelia was able to do. There seems no reason to doubt that she had a good heart, a loving nature, and the wish to lead a pure and honorable life. But she was too often thoughtless, careless, wilful, and headstrong, and, like many others who might have done well under fair conditions, she allowed the worst qualities of her nature to take the command just at the very moment when there {12} was most need for the exercise of all that was best in her. Even with regard to George himself, it seems only fair and reasonable to assume that he, too, might have done better if his marriage had not been merely an arrangement of State. Perhaps the whole history of State marriages contains no chapter at once more fantastic and more tragic than that which closed with the death of Caroline Amelia, wife of George the Fourth. [Sidenote: Death of Napoleon Bonaparte] While the joy-bells of London were already chiming for the coronation of George the Fourth, the most powerful enemy George's country had ever had was passing quietly away in St. Helena. On May 5, 1821, the Emperor Napoleon died in his island exile. No words could exaggerate the sensation produced through the whole world by the close of this marvellous career. He was unquestionably one of the greatest figures in history. As a conquering soldier he has no rival in the modern world, and indeed all the history we know of, ancient or modern, can give but very few names which may bear comparison with his. Unlike Caesar and Alexander, he had made his way from the humble obscurity of common life, and, unlike Caesar, he did not seem to have had in him the intellectual greatness which must have made him, under any conditions, a master of men and of hemispheres. So far as mere dramatic effect is concerned, he was less fortunate than Caesar in his disappearance from the world's stage. Napoleon was doomed to pine and wither away on a lonely island in the South Atlantic for years and years, and there was something like an anticlimax in the closing scenes of that marvellous life-drama. It is pitiful and saddening now to read of the trumpery annoyances and humiliations to which his days of exile were subjected, and to read, too, of the unceasing complaints with which he resented what he regarded as the insults offered to him by his jailers. There was, indeed, much that was ignoble in the manner of his treatment by those who had him in charge, in the paltry indignities which he had to endure, and which he could not endure in the patient dignity of silence. The mere refusal to allow to him his title of Emperor, and to insist {13} that he should only be addressed as General Bonaparte, was as illogical as it was ungenerous; for if revolutionary France had not