all apply in
the present case. Where is the peculiarity of the _occasion_? What
sufficient _reason_ is there for a series of events occurring in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which never took place before?
Was Europe at that period peculiarly weak, and in a state of
barbarism, that one man could achieve such conquests, and acquire such
a vast empire? On the contrary, she was flourishing in the height of
strength and civilization. Can the persevering attachment and blind
devotedness of the French to this man, be accounted for by his being
the descendant of a long line of kings, whose race was hallowed by
hereditary veneration? No; we are told he was a low-born usurper, and
not even a Frenchman! Is it that he was a good and kind sovereign? He
is represented not only as an imperious and merciless despot, but as
most wantonly careless of the lives of his soldiers. Could the French
army and people have failed to hear from the wretched survivors of his
supposed Russian expedition, how they had left the corpses of above
100,000 of their comrades bleaching on the snow-drifts of that dismal
country, whither his mad ambition had conducted him, and where his
selfish cowardice had deserted them? Wherever we turn to seek for
circumstances that may help to account for the events of this
incredible story, we only meet with such as aggravate its
improbability.[15] Had it been told of some distant country, at a
remote period, we could not have told what peculiar circumstances
there might have been to render probable what seems to us most
strange; and yet in _that_ case every philosophical sceptic, every
free-thinking speculator, would instantly have rejected such a
history, as utterly unworthy of credit. What, for instance, would the
great Hume, or any of the philosophers of his school, have said, if
they had found in the antique records of any nation, such a passage
as this? "There was a certain man of Corsica, whose name was Napoleon,
and he was one of the chief captains of the host of the French; and he
gathered together an army, and went and fought against Egypt: but when
the king of Britain heard thereof, he sent ships of war and valiant
men to fight against the French in Egypt. So they warred against them,
and prevailed, and strengthened the hands of the rulers of the land
against the French, and drave away Napoleon from before the city of
Acre. Then Napoleon left the captains and the army that were in Egypt,
and fled,