As a parallel to this splendid passage, though in an entirely different style, we gladly give place to a noble burst of Chateaubriand, on that most marvellous of marvellous events, the return of Napoleon from Elba. It was natural that so memorable a revolution should strongly impress his imaginative mind; but he seems to have exceeded himself in the reflections to which it gives rise. We know not whether to award the prize to the Englishman or the Frenchman, in these parallel passages. They are both masterpieces in their way. Perhaps the correct view is, that Macaulay is superior in graphic force and the accumulation of sarcastic images; Chateaubriand in lofty thought and imaginative images. "On the 1st March, at three o'clock in the morning, Napoleon approached the coast of France in the Gulf of Juan; he disembarked, walked along the shore, gathered a few violets, and bivouacked in an olive wood. The inhabitants withdrew in a state of stupefaction. He left Antibes to his left, and threw himself into the Mountains of Grasse in Dauphiny. At Sisterone the road passes a defile where twenty men might have stopped him; he did not meet a living soul. He advanced without opposition among the inhabitants who the year before had wished to murder him. Into the void which was formed around his gigantic shade, if a few soldiers entered, they straightway yielded to the attraction of his eagles. His fascinated enemies seek him and find him not; he shrowds himself in his glory, as the lion in the Sahara desert conceals himself in the rays of the sun to dazzle the eyes of his pursuers. Enveloped in a burning halo, the bloody phantoms of Arcola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Eylau, the Moskwa, Lützen, and Bautzen, form his cortege amidst a million of the dead. From the midst of that column of smoke and flame, issue at the gates of towns some trumpet-notes mingled with tricolor standards, and the gates fly open. When Napoleon passed the Niemen, at the head of four hundred thousand foot, and a hundred thousand horse, to blow into the air the palace of the Czars at Moscow, he was less wonderful than when, breaking his ban, casting his fetters as a gauntlet in the face of kings, he came alone from Cannes to Paris, to sleep peaceably in the palace of the Tuileries."--Vol. vi. p. 359, 360.