But he seems to have been awake to external objects to the last. For whenever Antommarchi attempted to moisten his lips, he repulsed him with his hand, and fixed his eyes on Montholon, as the only person whom he would permit to attend him. At sunset he died. The immediate cause of his death was subsequently ascertained by the surgeons to have been an extensive ulceration of the stomach. On the 9th of May the body was buried with military honours. On the 30th, Montholon, with the household, quitted St Helena. Thus obscurely, painfully, and almost ignominiously, closed the career of the most brilliant, ambitious, and powerful monarch of his time. No man had ever attained a higher rank, and sunk from it to a lower. No man had ever been so favoured by fortune. No man had ever possessed so large an influence over the mind of Europe, and been finally an object of hostility so universal. He was the only man in history, against whom a Continent in arms pronounced sentence of overthrow: the only soldier whose personal fall was the declared object of a general war:--and the only monarch whose capture ensured the fall of his dynasty, extinguished an empire, and finished the loftiest dream of human ambition in a dungeon. Napoleon, since his fall, has been denied genius. But if genius implies the power of accomplishing great ends by means beyond the invention of others, he was a genius. Every act of his career was a superb innovation. As a soldier, he changed the whole art of war. Instead of making campaigns of tactics, he made campaigns of triumphs. He wasted no time in besieging towns; he rushed on the capital. He made no wars of detachments, but threw a colossal force across the frontier, held its mass together, and fought pitched battles day after day, until he trampled down all resistance by the mere weight of a phalanx of 250,000 men. Thus, in 1800, at Marengo, he reconquered Italy in twelve hours. In 1805, he broke down Austria in a three months' war. In 1806, he crushed the Prussian army in four-and-twenty hours, and walked over the monarchy. In 1807, he drove the Russians out of Germany, fought the two desperate battles of Eylau and Friedland, and conquered that treaty of Tilsit, by which he gave the Emperor Alexander a shadow of empire in Asia, in exchange for the substance of universal empire in Europe.