As the left bank of the Rhine had already been ceded to France, that country, which had been only four years before in a state of political chaos, was at the head of Europe. What would she not do at the bidding of the man who could accomplish such things? He dramatically conceived the idea of crippling England by threatening her Asiatic possessions, and led an army into Egypt. There every bulletin, every address to his army, added to the glamour of his name. Even the Pyramids were made to serve his consummate art and ambition! Although his fleet was destroyed by Nelson and his army left in perilous position, he was needed at home, and returned with all the arrogance of a conqueror. He was appointed Generalissimo over the army by an enraptured France, and then swept aside the five Directors and appointed himself and two others Consuls. A second coalition was now formed against France, consisting of England, Russia, and Austria, and there followed another campaign in which Napoleon made permanent the results of the previous ones in Italy. By the treaty of peace in 1801, the three republics created by him were formally recognized, and the princes of Germany, in compensation for their losses, had apportioned among them the dominions of the priestly rulers. Thus at one blow were abolished one hundred states governed by archbishops, bishops, and other clerical dignitaries, and one of the foundation stones of the empire, laid by Charlemagne himself, was shattered. This extraordinary man, dreaming of universal empire, superstitiously believed that Fate intended him to hold Europe in his hand. But we can see now that he was designed by that remorseless Fate for a very different purpose, and a very brief office. He was a terrible instrument, which she intended to use for one specific purpose, and then to cast him aside. This work was the destruction of the Romano-Germanic Empire. That lifeless mass, whose oppressive weight had crushed the life and hope out of Central Europe for centuries, needed some tremendous force from without to break up its time-encrusted rivets. And that force was now in the hands of a workman who supposed he was engaged in rearing a great edifice for himself. Instead of which he was overturning, and plowing, and harrowing Germany, and preparing the ground for new forms of political life; and nothing more effectually pulverized the old tyrannies than this secularization of the priestly dominions. When, added to this, we see the extinction of a multitude of petty states and the abolition of the special privileges of nearly a thousand "Imperial" noble families, we realize how he was relieving Germany from the incubus which had paralyzed her for centuries. CHAPTER XVI.