others before he could set them on his own head. It is useless to seek even homely physical consistency in a man thus constituted. It is equally useless to ask whether Napoleon could have been as great a man in another epoch as he was in his own. In any epoch of warfare he would have been great; it is likely that in any epoch of peace he would have reached eminence as a legislator and administrator. The real historical question is this: How did he, being what he was, and his age, being what it was, interact one upon the other; and what was the resultant? There was as little consistency in his age as in himself; the sinuosities of each fitted strangely into those of the other, and the result was a period of twenty years on which common consent fixes the name of the Napoleonic age. Does his personality throw any light on the antecedent period--does his career influence the succeeding years? The age of the Revolution has such intimate connection with the movements of French society that it is very generally called in other countries the French Revolution. But while the movement developed itself more easily and took more radical forms in France than elsewhere, it was due to the condition of civilization the world around. France has been in a peculiar sense the teacher of Europe; for in language, literature, laws, and institutions she is the heir of Rome. In spite of Roman Catholicism, or perhaps in consequence of the Roman hierarchy, her inheritance has been pagan rather than Christian; her ethics have been Hellenic, her literature Augustan, her laws imperial, her temperament a combination of the Stoic and Epicurean which is essentially Latin, her language elegant, elliptical, and precise like that of Livy or Tacitus. The Teuton in general, the Anglo-Saxon in particular, may give his days and nights to classical studies: he is never so imbued with their spirit as the Gaul. "It is with his Bible in one pocket and his Shakspere in another," said an eminent Frenchman not long since, "that the Anglo-Saxon goes forth to reduce the world in the interests of his commerce, his civilization, and his religion. The most enlightened has neither the cold worldliness of Horace nor the calculating zeal of Caesar, but he has the persistency of faith in himself and his nation which, whatever may be his personal belief, is a constituent element in his blood, or, better still, the controlling member of that complex organism to which he belongs." I venture to believe, on the other hand, that the Frenchman espouses his cause from an unselfish impulse begotten of pure reason, an ethereal ichor percolating through society by channels of sympathy, which diminishes the historic pressure for continuous national consistency and natural unity, but emphasizes the great uplifting movements of society. The French armies of the Revolution went forth to scour Europe for its deliverance from feudalism, absolutism, and ecclesiasticism, because the French people had renewed