In actual captivity his mind was without a sufficient task and under no pressure from necessity. It consequently, though somewhat invigorated at first, intermitted more and more toward the close, working, when it did work, awkwardly and with friction, until the physical collapse came, and the end was reached. The attempts to remodel history, the efforts to delineate his own and others' motives, the specious summaries of his career and its epochs, the fragmentary expositions of his philosophy in ethics, politics, and psychology--all the stately volumes which bear his name, his literary remains, in fact, present a pitiful sight when closely examined. They are but the scoriae of a burnt-out mind, but dust and ashes; a splendid mass, but an extinct volcano. It was only natural that his successors and admirers should seek to erect a more enduring foundation for his fame by collecting and carefully editing what he had written when at his best, when acting according to his momentary, normal impulse, and when, therefore, he had the least pose and the greatest sincerity. But it is a proof of their shrewdness that they selected and published less and less after Erfurt, and that out of the voluminous pen-product of St. Helena they chose a hundred and fifty pages which the "Correspondence," intended to be the most splendid monument to the Emperor's glory, could present as authentic biographical material. If, then, Napoleon was after all but a plain man, how did he become a personage? Simply because he was the typical man of his day, less the personal mediocrity; the typical burgher in personal character, the typical soldier in war, the typical despot in peace, and the typical idealist in politics; capable in all these qualities of analysis; capable, consequently, of being understood; capable of exhaustion and of being overwhelmed by combinations. In other words, he was really great because he was the shrewd common-sense personage of his age, considering the ideal social structure as a level of comfort in money, in shelter, in food, in clothes, in religion, in morality, in decency, in domestic good-nature, in the commonplace good things fairly divided as far as they would go round. This was the side of his nature which in a period of social exhaustion planted him four-square as a social force, presented him to France as the rock against which the "red fool-fury" of Jacobinism had dashed itself to pieces, and gave him for a time command of all hearts. Thus established, he at once fell heir to French tradition--that is, to the continuous policy of the nation in foreign and domestic affairs; which was that France should be the Jupiter in the Olympus of European nations by reason of her excellence both in beauty and in strength. Here was a temptation not to be resisted, the superlative temptation like that of the serpent and the woman, the chance to transcend by knowledge, the opportunity to "hitch