“Napoleon must certainly be tried by new principles of judgment. The maxims upon which the fame of Turenne and Marlboro’ has been settled, will not give him his true position.” “Napoleon made glory according to a receipt of his own. But the misfortune is, that he not only imposed this false stuff upon us, but he revolutionized the chemistry by which its spuriousness should be detected. He depraved the opinions, and bent backwards the consciences of people. But upon the whole, I think we may say, that in life, the most beautiful of the fine arts, his taste was anything but classical. He belonged to the David school, and painted on the canvass of Time, such pictures as that man hung up in the Louvre—bombast conceptions, executed in the daub. But after all he was a splendid creature; he made a glorious pastime in Europe; he showed the world a magnificent sport; he filled the pages of history with matter which possessed an endless interest. Strike out his career, and what blankness remains! The truth is, this life of ours is enveloped in endless coverings, coats, over-coats and blankets of common-place—an atmosphere of common-place, dull, dense, unbreathable—a waking, inlaid with sleep—life overlaid with death. Walled in, and under-buried in a mass of tedium, one cannot get one’s breath. Sometimes, the world becomes intensely conscious of this imprisonment, and goes mad in trying to get free from itself. What wonder, if suffocated by being wrapped in a dun, drowsy, over-growing thraldom of common-place—its eye sick with sameness, its ear vexed with a cracked monotony, its soul should grow convulsive, become volcanic, and throwing off the whole disgusting encumbrance of the social system, it should rush forth to the free wilderness where it may once more see the fresh, eternal stars, and breathe a living air. And we must thank Napoleon for his battles; for war is the glory of our disgraced existence. Struggle is the parent of all the greatness of our being. It is only when minds wrestle in the energy of desperation with other minds, or with things, as in war, that the last degrees of intellectual and moral power are seen. The literary man goes half to sleep, and keeps awake only enough to purr his satisfaction at his demi-unconsciousness. In this world we must fight even to keep ourselves alive. The politicians of this piping time doze away their days as if they had a hundred existences to enjoy: as if life were a chair to loll in, a corridor to walk, or a hall to dance in, and not a general battle-field on which to fight for everything.”