Of the two men who, under those strange and novel descriptions, signed the Treaty of Pressburg, if one had forgotten who and what he was, the other knew perfectly well who and what he was. The first Buonaparte did not, like writers and orators now-a-days, use the words “Emperor” and “Empire” simply to sound fine. When he called himself “Emperor of the French,” he knew perfectly well what he meant by the name. What he meant involved to be sure a few historical misrepresentations, but they were misrepresentations which were very convenient for his purpose. Once grant that Austrasian Charles and Corsican Buonaparte were alike Frenchmen, and the theory does not hang badly together. The lordship of the world, at the lowest the supremacy of Western Europe, was translated from Rome and Germany to France. The ruler of France held the position in the world which the rulers of Rome and Germany once had held. So it was in fact; the style of 1804 did but put that fact into very emphatic words. There was again an Emperor, a βασιλεύς with ῥῆγες around him; only that βασιλεύς was no longer Roman, Greek, or German, but, by conquest at least, French. It might even add a malicious sweetness to the new Imperial position to reckon Rome and Germany among the subject lands of France. The first French Empire was not a mere survival of the Roman Empire in any of its stages; nor was it a mere analogy, as when we apply the Imperial name to barbarian princes who hold an Imperial position in their own world. The Empire of the Moguls in many things repeated the Empire of the Cæsars; but it repeated it unconsciously. But about the French Empire everything was conscious; every detail of imposture had a meaning. It was not in any sense a survival, neither was it a true revival; it was in some sort a mockery, in some sort an imitation, a spurious branch of the same stock, a parody of the old Empire set up in a kind of strange rivalry on the ground of the old Empire. But the old Empire was not made but grew; it took a long time even to crumble in pieces. The new Empire, made by one man, grew mightily for a few years, and then broke asunder in a moment. Still the new Civilis, the man who made the Empire of the Gauls, must be allowed the doubtful pre-eminence of being, if κακοπράγμων, at least μεγαλοπράγμων also. Of the grotesque imitation of his work to which some bowed down not twenty years back, it is needless to speak.