Napoleon's career was _providential_; there is no name in history, whose whole course bears so palpable a proof of his having been created for a _historic_ purpose. Europe, in the partition of Poland, had committed a great crime,--France, in the murder of her king, had committed a great crime. The three criminal thrones, and the regicidal republic, were alike to be punished. Napoleon was the appointed instrument for both purposes. He first crushed the democracy, and then he broke the strength of the three powers in the field--he thrice conquered the Austrian capital--he turned Prussia into a province,--and his march to Russia desolated her most populous provinces, and laid her Asiatic capital in ashes. But France, which continually paid for all those fearful triumphs in her blood, was still to suffer a final and retributive punishment. Her armies were hunted from the Vistula to the Rhine, and from the Rhine to the Seine. She saw her capital twice captured--her government twice swept away--her conquests lost--her plunder recovered by its original possessors, and her territory garrisoned by an army of strangers--her army disbanded--her empire cut down to the limits of the old monarchy--her old masters restored, and her idol torn from his altar. Thus were thrown away the fruits of the Revolution, of the regicide, of the democracy, and of a quarter of a century of wretchedness, fury, and blood. On Napoleon himself fell the heaviest blow of all. All the shames, sorrows, and sufferings of France were concentered on his head. He saw his military power ruined--his last army slaughtered--his last adherents exiled--his family fugitive,--his whole dynasty uncrowned, and himself given up as a prisoner to England, to be sent to an English dungeon, to be kept in English hands; to finish his solitary and bitter existence in desertion and disease, and be laid in an English grave,--leaving to mankind perhaps the most striking moral of blasted ambition ever given to the world. * * * * * In 1840 England, at the solicitation of France, suffered the remains of Napoleon to be brought to Europe. They were received in Paris with military pomp, and on the 15th of December were entombed in the chapel of the Invalides. FOOTNOTES: [10] _History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena._ By General Count MONTHOLON Vols. iii. and iv. London: H. Colburn. JUANCHO THE BULL-FIGHTER.