rulers.
Such laborious analysis as his despatches display, such grasp both of
outline and detail, such absence of confusion and clearness of vision,
such lack of hesitance and such definition of plan, seem to prove that
either a hero or a demon is again on earth. All the capacity this man
had hitherto shown, great as it was, sinks into insignificance when
compared with the Olympian powers he now displays, and will continue
to display for years to come. His sinews are iron, his nerves are
steel, his eyes need no sleep, and his brain no rest. What a captured
Hungarian veteran said of him at Lodi is as true of his political
activity as of his military restlessness: "He knows nothing of the
regular rules of war: he is sometimes on our front, sometimes on the
flank, sometimes in the rear. There is no supporting such a gross
violation of rules." His senses and his reason were indeed untrammeled
by human limitations; they worked on front, rear, and flank, often
simultaneously, and always without confusion.

Was it astonishing that the French nation, just recovering from a
debauch of irreligion and anarchy, should begin insensibly to yield to
the charms of a wooer so seductive? For some time past the soldiers,
as the Milan newspapers declared, had been a pack of tatterdemalions
ever flying before the arms of his Majesty the Emperor; now they were
victors, led by a second Caesar or Alexander, clothed, fed, and paid at
the cost of the conquered. To ardent French republicans, and to the
peoples of Italy, this phenomenal personage proclaimed that he had
come to break the chains of captives, while almost in the same hour he
wrote to the Directory that he was levying twenty million francs on
the country, which, though exhausted by five years of war, was then
the richest in the civilized world. Nor was the self-esteem of France
and the Parisian passion for adornment forgotten. There began a course
of plunder, if not in a direction at least in a measure hitherto
unknown to the modern world--the plunder of scientific specimens, of
manuscripts, of pictures, statues, and other works of art. It is
difficult to fix the responsibility for this policy, which by the
overwhelming majority of learned and intelligent Frenchmen was
considered right, morally and legally. Nothing so flattered the
national pride as the assemblage in Paris of art treasures from all
nations, nothing so humiliated it as their dispersion at the behest of
the conquering