The writings relative to this man constitute a cycle. The books on him and his times make a library, the perusal and study of which might absorb a large section of an active life. The name of such productions is legion. Most of them will fortunately perish. The controversial aspect of the life of the Emperor must at last subside. Nine out of ten of the books about him will go down to the nether oblivion. Then the judicial aspect will arise--if it has not already arisen--and will occupy the attention of those who are still curious to study the career of him who shares with the son of Philip and the matchless Julius the triune honor of being the greatest warriors known to human history. If a fourth should be added to the group it would be Hannibal, and if a fifth, Charlemagne. Here at the date of a century from those days in which the star of Napoleon emerged from the mists and clouds and began to climb the sky the interest in his life revives. In America this revival is attributable in part to general and in part to special causes. The general causes are to be found in the fact that society _de la fin de siècle_ is in such a state of profound disturbance, and the existing order feels so insecure, that that order--as it always does--begins to cast about in the shadows to find, if it may, some Big Man with a Sword; him when found we will make our Imperator, and by sharing some of our estates with certain of his military subalterns we will make sure of the rest--and after us the deluge. The special cause--at least in America--is the tremendous and growing tradition of General Grant. Albeit, General Grant hated the Bonapartes, from the Great One to the Little One; yet his own luminous setting has left a glow in which the nation sees men as trees walking--and among these the greatest simulacrum is Napoleon Bonaparte. Of this man, who began as the son of a Corsican peasant-mother working in a mulberry orchard, and who, after fifty-one years, eight months, and twenty days, ended in a cyclone on the rock called St. Helena, having meanwhile for nearly a third of his life bestridden western Europe like a colossus,--a new biography claiming to be the ultimate summation of the Emperor's life and character has appeared. Professor William Milligan Sloane, of Princeton University, has entered the lists which may be said to have opened with Walter Scott and finished with the McClure Syndicate, passing meanwhile by way of such personages as De Staël, Las Cases, Victor Hugo, and Lanfrey, and such drudges as Bourrienne and Méneval, to lodge at last with the miscellaneous hacks who get three dollars a column for their boiler-plate philosophy in American newspapers! Heavens, what a scrimmage!