The similarity of the two rulers is obvious and has been frequently referred to. That it should until now have been less recognised than it ought, is, perhaps, due to the fact that the characters of the two were after all fundamentally different. One might almost say the similarity lay in the circumstances of the times, the dissimilarity in the characters of the persons; and the more we harp on the former the clearer appears the latter. Napoleon remained all his life what Augustus never was, a dreamer and a conspirator. According to the version of De Tocqueville, Napoleon knew no hard and fast boundary between dreaming and thinking; this may have been the result of his moping youth with its conspiracies, his imprisonment, and his fantastic designs which never were realised but by the most extraordinary strokes of luck. Augustus, on the other hand, never had time to devote to dreamy imaginings. When he was still almost a boy, he had thrown himself on his own initiative into the struggle of parties, and from the beginning he had to summon all the powers of his mind to aid him in the struggle against opponents maturer than himself; so it is that later when power was his he never dreamed but always thought. Moreover, Augustus was never a conspirator. He obtained power early and wielded it recklessly. He both loathed and found superfluous that covert toying with designs and intrigues which shunned the public eye until they suddenly burst into publicity with éclat, such as Napoleon loved. Augustus enjoyed the great advantage of still being teachable when he came into the actual possession of power, and of being formed into a statesman by the circumstances themselves; Napoleon, on the other hand, was much older when he came to the throne; in his best years he was forging schemes to attain an apparently unattainable goal. He was laughed at as a nurser of fancies until he became emperor; small wonder then that the emperor’s plans remained fanciful and singular and that, as a ruler, he lacked the gift which distinguished Augustus in so high a degree--the gift of judging soberly what was attainable, or what was necessary. As emperor, Napoleon could never quite forget the adventurous designs of his youth. Place at the disposal of such a man the whole machinery of power in modern France, and perhaps he will be able to carry out plans that a careful observer would pronounce to be impossible of execution, but the reaction is bound to come, and it did not fail to do so here.