Napoleon was now almost adored by the republicans all over Europe, as the great champion of popular rights. The people looked to him as their friend and advocate. In England, in particular, there was a large, influential, and increasing party, dissatisfied with the prerogatives of the crown, and with the exclusive privileges of the nobility, who were never weary of proclaiming the praises of this champion of liberty and equality. The brilliance of his intellect, the purity of his morals, the stoical firmness of his self-endurance, his untiring energy, the glowing eloquence of every sentence which fell from his lips, his youth and feminine stature, and his wondrous achievements, all combined to invest him with a fascination such as no mortal man ever exerted before. The command of the army for the invasion of England was now assigned to Napoleon. He became the prominent and dreaded foe of that great empire. And yet the common people who were to fight the battles almost to a man loved him. The throne trembled. The nobles were in consternation. "If we deal fairly and justly with France," Lord Chatham is reported frankly to have avowed, "the English government will not exist for four-and-twenty hours." It was necessary to change public sentiment and to rouse feelings of personal animosity against this powerful antagonist. To render Napoleon unpopular, all the wealth and energies of the government were called into requisition, opening upon him the batteries of ceaseless invective. The English press teemed with the most atrocious and absurd abuse. It is truly amusing, in glancing over the pamphlets of that day, to contemplate the enormity of the vices attributed to him, and their contradictory nature. He was represented as a perfect demon in human form. He was a robber and a miser, plundering the treasuries of nations that he might hoard his countless millions, and he was also a profligate and a spendthrift, squandering upon his lusts the wealth of empires. He was wallowing in licentiousness, his camp a harem of pollution, ridding himself by poison of his concubines as his vagrant desires wandered from them; at the same time he was _physically an imbecile_--a monster--whom God in his displeasure had deprived of the passions and the powers of healthy manhood. He was an idol whom the entranced people bowed down before and worshiped, with more than Oriental servility. He was also a sanguinary heartless, merciless butcher, exulting in carnage, grinding the bones of his own wounded soldiers into the dust beneath his chariot wheels, and finding congenial music for his depraved and malignant spirit in the shrieks of the mangled and the groans of the dying. To Catholic Ireland he was represented as seizing the venerable Pope by his gray hairs, and thus dragging him over the marble floor of his palace. To Protestant England, on the contrary, he was exhibited as in league with the Pope, whom he treated with the utmost adulation, endeavoring to strengthen the