Was it astonishing that the French nation, just recovering from a debauch of irreligion and anarchy, should begin insensibly to yield to the charms of a wooer so seductive? For some time past the soldiers, as the Milan newspapers declared, had been a pack of tatterdemalions ever flying before the arms of his Majesty the Emperor; now they were victors, led by a second Cæsar or Alexander, clothed, fed, and paid at the cost of the conquered. To ardent French republicans, and to the peoples of Italy, this phenomenal personage proclaimed that he had come to break the chains of captives, while almost in the same hour he wrote to the Directory that he was levying twenty million francs on the country, which, though exhausted by five years of war, was then the richest in the civilized world. Nor was the self-esteem of France and the Parisian passion for adornment forgotten. There began a course of plunder, if not in a direction at least in a measure hitherto unknown to the modern world--the plunder of scientific specimens, of manuscripts, of pictures, statues, and other works of art. It is difficult to fix the responsibility for this policy, which by the overwhelming majority of learned and intelligent Frenchmen was considered right, morally and legally. Nothing so flattered the national pride as the assemblage in Paris of art treasures from all nations, nothing so humiliated it as their dispersion at the behest of the conquering Allies. In the previous year a few art works had been taken from Holland and Belgium, and formal orders were given again and again by the Directory for stripping the Pope's galleries; but there is a persistent belief, founded, no doubt, in an inherent probability, that the whole comprehensive scheme of art spoliation had been suggested in the first place by Bonaparte, and prearranged between himself and the executive before his departure. At any rate, he asked and easily obtained from the government a commission of scholars and experts to scour the Italian cities; and soon untold treasures of art, letters, and science began to pour into the galleries, cabinets, and libraries of Paris. A few brave voices among the artists of the capital protested against the desecration; the nation at large was tipsy with delight, and would not listen. Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, Correggio, Giorgione, and Paul Veronese, with all the lesser masters, were stowed in the holds of frigates and despatched by way of Toulon toward the new Rome; while Monge and Berthollet ransacked the scientific collections of Milan and Parma for their rarest specimens. Science, in fact, was to flourish on the banks of the Seine as never before or elsewhere; and the great investigators of Italy, forgetful of their native land, were to find a new citizenship in the world of knowledge at the capital of European liberties. Words like these, addressed to the astronomer Oriani, indicate that on Bonaparte's mind had dawned the notion of a universal federated state,