family, is apt to be used with caprice rather than judgment, and becomes a snare to those who possess it, as well as a burden to those over whom it extends. A father, for example, seeks the happiness of his son, while he endeavours to assure his fortunes, by compelling him to enter into a mercenary and reluctant marriage; and Buonaparte conceived himself to be benefiting as well as aggrandizing France, when, preferring the splendour of conquest to the blessings of peace, he led the flower of her young men to perish in foreign fields, and finally was the means of her being delivered up, drained of her population,[94] to the mercy of the foreign invaders, whose resentment his ambition had provoked. [Sidenote: CHANGES IN ITALY.] Such are the considerations which naturally arise out of Napoleon's final and avowed assumption of the absolute power, which he had in reality possessed and exercised ever since he had been created First Consul for life. It was soon after made manifest, that France, enlarged and increased in strength as she had been under his auspices, was yet too narrow a sphere for his domination. Italy afforded the first illustration of his grasping ambition.[95] The northern states of Italy had followed the example of France through all her change of models. They had become republican in a directorial form, when Napoleon's sword conquered them from the Austrians; had changed to an establishment similar to the consular, when that was instituted in Paris by the 18th Brumaire; and were now destined to receive, as a king, him who had lately accepted and exercised with regal authority the office of their president. The authorities of the Italian (late Cisalpine) republic had a prescient guess of what was expected of them. A deputation[96] appeared at Paris, to declare the absolute necessity which they felt, that their government should assume a monarchical and hereditary form. On the 17th March, 1805, they obtained an audience of the Emperor, to whom they intimated the unanimous desire of their countrymen, that Napoleon, founder of the Italian Republic, should be monarch of the Italian Kingdom. He was to have power to name his successor, such being always a native of France or Italy. With an affectation of jealous independence, however, the authors of this "humble petition and advice" stipulated, that the crowns of France and Italy should never, save in the present instance, be placed on the head of the same monarch. Napoleon might, during his life, devolve the sovereignty of Italy on one of his descendants, either natural or adopted; but it was anxiously stipulated, that such delegation should not be made during the period while France continued to occupy the Neapolitan territories, the Russians Corfu, and the British Malta.[97]