This single cause of Napoleon's fall can be better seen in the record of his second captivity than in any other portion of his life. There is no such thing as absolute exhaustion short of death. But intermittent and flickering exertion is symptomatic of failing powers in a jaded horse; it forebodes the end in a worn-out man. Cheerful and busy at first, because recruited by a long and favorable sea-voyage, he set out in St. Helena at a racing gait to write history and mold the public opinion of Europe. Playful and energetic, he caught together the scanty remnants of his momentary grandeur, and emulated the masters of ceremony at the Tuileries in organizing a court and issuing edicts for the conduct of its little affairs. His life was to be that of a caged lion--caged, but yet a lion. The plan would not work. In the affairs of Longwood there were, as everywhere, hitches and irregularities. To Napoleon these soon became not the incidents, but the substance of life. With the departure of his secretaries the business of biographical composition became first irksome, then impossible, and the poor muse of history was finally turned out of doors. To regular exercise succeeded spasmodic over-exertion; complaint became the subject-matter for the exercise of both mind and tongue; daily association with kindly but second-rate persons checked the flow of great ideas; the combinations of Austerlitz and Wagram gave place to the small moves in a game of spite with a bureaucratic British governor. From the days of his boyhood until his alliance with Barras the exile had been a dreamy, vague, indefinite, unsuccessful fellow; his powers were not quickly developed. While he had France and Europe to work upon, he showed the extraordinary qualities repeatedly outlined, mind and hand, thought and deed, working together. Already jaded, his stupendous capacity became intermittent after the fatal armistice of Poischwitz; but it worked, for it still had the raw material of grand strategy and great politics to work on. This continued until after Waterloo. That battle, not a great one in itself, was nevertheless epic, both in its effects upon the world and in its ruin of the brains which had swayed the destinies of Europe for twenty years. Between the flight to Charleroi and the escape to the _Bellerophon_, Napoleon shows no pluck and no brains.