their youthful and pristine vigor in their enthusiasm for pure principle without regard to experience or expediency. Napoleon Bonaparte had all their doctrine, with something more: a consuming ardor unconscious of any physical limitations to the nervous strength of himself or others, and a readiness for any fate which would transmute his dull, unsuccessful, commonplace existence into excitement. When he found his opportunity to heap Pelion upon Ossa, to supplement himself by the splendors of French devotion, he did indeed come near to transcending even the Olympians and storming the seat of Kronos. It was a long, discouraging, heartbreaking struggle by which he gained his first vantage-ground. This was no exceptional experience; for every adventurer knows that it is more troublesome to make the start than to continue the advance. It is harder to save the first small capital than to conduct a prosperous business. It is more difficult, apparently, in human life to overcome the inertia of immobility than that of motion; at least psychological laws seem in this respect to contravene those of physics. It is not true that the armies of the Republic were those of the Bourbons: the transition may have been gradual, but it was radical. It is also untrue that the armies of Napoleon were those of the Revolution: they differed as the zenith from the nadir, being recruited on a new principle, animated by new motives, and led by an entirely different class of men. A supreme command having been attained by means curiously compounded of chivalric romance and base scheming, the man of action did not hesitate a moment to put every power in motion. Throwing off all superior control, he set himself to every task in the revolution of Italy--conquest, political and religious; constructive politics and administration; social and financial transformation. Winning the devotion of his troops by intoxicating successes, as a leveler he was permanently successful; but this typical burgher had no permanent success in building up a democratic-imperial society out of the royal, princely, and aristocratic elements which had so long monopolized the ability of the peninsula; what he wrought outlasted his time, but the country had to undergo another revolution before its middle classes were ready for the heavy burden of independence and self-government. Yet the struggle for what was accomplished appears to have created a climacteric in the doer. Before the days of Italy his ambitions were petty enough: employment in the service of Russia or England, supremacy in Corsica or military promotion in France; but afterward they enlarged by leaps and bounds: Italian principalities, Austrian dukedoms, Lombard confederations, the primacy of France in some form, Oriental dominion--one such concept took form in the morning, to be swept away at night and replaced by ever more luxurious growths of fantasy. The realization of these dreams was still more amazing than their misty formation.