Was this the end, and did Napoleon have no place in history, as many historians have lately been contending? Far from it. From his couch of porphyry beneath the gilded dome on the banks of the Seine, the Emperor, though "dead and turned to clay," still exercises a powerful sway. The actual Napoleonic Empire had, as we have before remarked, a striking resemblance to those of Alexander and Charlemagne. Based, as were these, upon conquest, and continued for a little life by the idealism of a single person, it seemed like a brilliant bubble on the stream of time. But Alexander hellenized the civilization of his day, and prepared the world for Christianity; Charlemagne plowed, harrowed, and sowed the soil of barbaric Europe, making it receptive for the most superb of all secular ideals, that of nationality; Napoleon tore up the system of absolutism by the roots, propagated in the most distant lands of Europe the modern conception of individual rights, overthrew the rotten structure of the German-Roman empire, and in spite of himself regenerated the long-abused ideas of nationality and fatherland. It must be confessed that his own shallow political science, the second-hand Rousseauism he had learned from his desultory reading, had little to do with this, except negatively. One by one he saw his faiths made ridiculous by the violent phases of Jacobinism after it took control of the Revolutionary movement. His heart, his conscience, his intellect, all undisciplined, then revolted against the metaphysic which had misled him, and "ideologist" became his most contemptuous epithet. Controlled by instinct and ambition, he nevertheless remained throughout his period the one thorough idealist among the men of action, Goethe being the superlative, transcendent genius of idealism among the thinkers. Each successive day saw his scorn of physical limitations increase, his impatience of language, customs, laws, of local attachment, personal fidelity, and national patriotism grow. The result was a fixed conviction that for humanity at large all these were naught. At last he planted himself upon the burgher philosophy of utility and expediency, putting his faith in the loyalty of his family, in homely dependence upon matrimonial alliance, in the passion of humanity for physical ease and earthly well-being. This was the concert by which he sought to create a federation of beneficent kingdoms that would win all men to the prime mover. Space and time rebelled; the lofty ideals of humanity and philosophy would not down; selfishness proved impotent as a support; the dreamer recognized that again he had been deceived. Haggard and exhausted, he finally turned, in the role of Napoleon Liberator, to the notion of nationality and of government swayed by popular will in all its phases. But it was too late. Instead of being the leader of a van, he had forgotten, in his own phrase, to keep pace with the march of