boldly uttered--"France and Bonaparte." Since the death of Mohammed, no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character. Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the first year of the century dedicates to him his _Génie du Christianisme_, that work which, after _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, most deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed. And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name "Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest achievement in art, save the _Prometheus_ of Shelley, that the Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired. In that year, at Weimar, Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the disdain of the greater poet. Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even then the spell of Napoleon's name. And in that year, the greatest of English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul, with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel, the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in Europe and in the world. To the calmer devotion of genius was added the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany. And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men--an energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all around was trouble and disarray--the calm of a spirit habituated to the Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here. If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the victor, it was but for a moment. In the universal horror and joy with which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.