hands of Time can destroy; what the breath makes, a breath obliterates, for the thing made was no more than a breath. Draw a line around certain states on the map, and call it the confederation of the Rhine; give geographical nicknames to a quantity of soldiers, and call it an aristocracy: behold the creations of Napoleon! Alfred established tithings, hundred courts and county courts; that principle of self-government—for the administration of law is the most important part of government—that little flame, shrined in those humble vestal temples, and there kept safe against the blasts of ages of tyranny’s turbulence, blazed up eight centuries later, and wrapt the throne of Charles in combustion. Plantaganet kings might call their system an absolute monarchy; the Tudors and Stuarts might diffuse the idea of divine right; but Alfred, by establishing juries and the common law, had made the _thing_ republic, and that was sure to beat down the _name_, monarchy. Call you a man great whose life-work is swept away in half an hour, without any principle of re-action or re-establishment showing itself? Nay, his works always carried with them the germ of their own destruction. The light that shone around his system was the phosphorescence of decay.” “This much,” said Mr. Temple, “may be said for Napoleon, that he raised himself to absoluteism without degrading others to slavery.” “Why, ’tis a monkey’s trick to mount up on people’s heads. Richelieu got there, as a man does; not by walking up men’s backs, but by making them stoop for him to get on. In effect, the true and bright view of Napoleon’s empire is, to consider it a democracy. Viewed as a monarch, rising and reigning in a constitution fashioned after the old forms, he was a mountebank and an impostor; considered as the controlling spirit in a democracy of powerful spirits, the head-idea in a nation—tumult of ideas—the odd man who is pushed up in a crowd of men—he becomes a spectacle of wonder, a riddle of infinite wisdom. The last of the old system, he is nothing; the first of a new one, everything. Regarded as the type of that democratic system which will overrun the world, his empire is a splendid, infinitely-crowded rehearsal of the coming drama of ages. He who would understand the whole nature, power and philosophy of democracy, must study that empire. Many thoughts belong to that subject. But I have harangued too long. Pitt was the man who said with absolute truth, that Napoleon was “the child and champion of democracy.” The spectacle of the force of old monarchy in the person of the stern, iron duke, slowly advancing and destroying this young system, is the picture of the gloomy Saturn relentlessly devouring his joyous giant-boys. The Jupiter of that old deity nestles yet a babe near his bosom; his begetting was in Pitt’s time, his birth at the Reform Bill.”