memory in three beautiful songs, "She is far from the land
where her young hero sleeps," she being of course Sarah Curran, to whom
Emmet addressed his last written words; "Oh, breathe not his name," and
"When he who adores thee," an appeal to Ireland to remember him who had
at least "the pride of thus dying for thee." Washington Irving, the
American author, devoted a touching essay, called "The Broken Heart,"
to the story of Robert Emmet and his blighted passion. The lovers of
romance may be somewhat disconcerted to hear that Sarah Curran married
after her young hero's death; but she remained single many years, and
there is no reason to suppose that she ever forgot or disclaimed her
affection for Robert Emmet. Wolfe Tone's wife married again some
sixteen years after the husband of her youth had passed away. Her
grave is to be seen in a cemetery close to Washington, in the United
States, the land in which Wolfe Tone's widow passed all the later years
of her life.

With the failure and the death of Robert Emmet closed the last
rebellious rising in Ireland which belongs to the {330} history of the
Georges. Pitt's Act of Union is still in force, but it would be idle
to say that it is anything more than in force. The union between
England and Scotland, to which Pitt's supporters so often triumphantly
appealed, was made under conditions and on terms totally different from
those which had to do with the union between England and Ireland.

{331}

CHAPTER LXII.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

[Sidenote: 1793-1815--The genius of the great Bonaparte]

Nothing in the history of the world is quite as wonderful as the
history of the first Napoleon. No other man ever rose from so little
to so much, ever played a greater part in the eyes of the civilized
world, was more monstrous in his triumphs or more tragic in his fall.
Everything connected with his strange career was distorted,
exaggerated, seemingly out of all proportion to the familiarities, the
conventionalities, and even the possibilities of existence. As the
ancient Greeks, in their sculpture, for the delineation of their gods
permitted themselves the use of the heroic size and made their
immortals and their demi-gods more than common tall, and more than
common comely, so might the modern historian seem privileged in the use
of a superlative style in dealing with a life so phenomenal, so
unbounded by the average horizon, so ungoverned by the ordinary laws.
And yet