verted in a few days; everything happened in
defiance of political calculations, and in opposition to the
_experience_ of past times; everything upon that grand scale, so common
in Epic Poetry, so rare in real life; and thus calculated to strike the
imagination of the vulgar, and to remind the sober-thinking few of the
Arabian Nights. Every event, too, has that _roundness_ and completeness
which is so characteristic of fiction; nothing is done by halves; we
have _complete_ victories,--_total_ overthrows, _entire_ subversion of
empires,--_perfect_ re-establishments of them,--crowded upon us in rapid
succession. To enumerate the improbabilities of each of the several
parts of this history, would fill volumes; but they are so fresh in
every one's memory, that there is no need of such a detail: let any
judicious man, not ignorant of history and of human nature, revolve them
in his mind, and consider how far they are conformable to
Experience,[12] our best and only sure guide. In vain will he seek in
history for something similar to this wonderful Buonaparte; "nought but
himself can be his parallel."

Will the conquests of Alexander be compared with his? _They_ were
effected over a rabble of effeminate, undisciplined barbarians; else
his progress would hardly have been so rapid: witness his father
Philip, who was much longer occupied in subduing the comparatively
insignificant territory of the warlike and civilized Greeks,
notwithstanding their being divided into numerous petty States, whose
mutual jealousy enabled him to contend with them separately. But the
Greeks had never made such progress in arts and arms as the great and
powerful States of Europe, which Buonaparte is represented as so
speedily overpowering. His empire has been compared to the Roman: mark
the contrast; he gains in a few years, that dominion, or at least
control, over Germany, wealthy, civilized, and powerful, which the
Romans in the plenitude of their power, could not obtain, during a
struggle of as many centuries, against the ignorant half-savages who
then possessed it; of whom Tacitus remarks, that, up to his own time
they had been "triumphed over rather than conquered."

Another peculiar circumstance in the history of this extraordinary
personage is, that when it Is found convenient to represent him as
defeated, though he is by no means defeated by halves, but involved in
much more sudden and total ruin than the personages of real history
usually