ugh to satisfy
any ambition less exacting than his. But he had the generous greed of
the great soldier, the restless, high-reaching spirit, to which {344}
the success of yesterday is as nothing save as an experience that may
serve for the success of to-morrow. No better field than India could
have been found for a young and ambitious soldier who had devoted
himself to his career almost by chance, but who was resolved to approve
his choice by giving to the career of arms a zeal, a stubborn
pertinacity, a very passion of patience, rare, indeed, at the time, and
who was resolved to regard nothing as too great to attempt, or too
trivial to notice, in the execution of his duty.

After a career of military honor and experience in India, Arthur
Wellesley began his struggle with Napoleon on the battle-fields of the
Spanish Peninsula, and ended it upon the battle-field of Waterloo. His
was the hand that gave the final blow to the falling, failing Emperor.
The career of so much glory and of so much gloom, of Corsican
lieutenantship and Empire, of Brumaire and Bourbon Restoration, of
Egyptian pyramids and Russian snows, of Tilsit and of Elba, and of the
Hundred Days, ended in the Island of St. Helena. There exists among
the documents that are preserved from Napoleon's youth a geographical
list made out in his own boyish hand of names and places, with
explanatory comments. The name of St. Helena is on the list, and the
only words written opposite to it are "Little Island." The Preacher on
Vanities never had a better text for a sermon. The "little island"
that had then seemed so unimportant became in the end more momentous
than the Eastern Empire of his dreams. The man who had made and unmade
kingdoms, who had flung down the crowns of Europe for soldiers of
fortune to scramble for as boys unto a muss, was now the unhonored
captive of ungenerous opponents, the unhonored victim of the petty
tyrannies of Sir Hudson Lowe.

[Sidenote: 1812-15--The War of 1812]

As the most disastrous event of the reign of George the Third prior to
the Regency was a war with America, so the most disastrous event of the
Regency was a war with America. Napoleon's fantastic decrees of
commercial blockade levelled against England, and known as the
Continental system, had embroiled the young republic and England, and
differences inflamed by the unwisdom of {345} Perceval were not to be
healed by the belated wisdom of Castlereagh. Two keen causes o