ty."

But the statesman who sustained Austria and procured for it the alliance
of France was not Metternich. Napoleon is known to have long wavered as
to whether he would build his European system on a close alliance with
Prussia or with Austria. Bignon we believe it is that gives the reasons
in the imperial mind for and against. Prussia was the preferable ally,
being a new country, untrammelled by aristocratic ideas, ambitious,
military, and eager for domination. But Napoleon had humiliated Prussia
too deeply to be forgiven. And then Napoleon had in those around him
politicians who revered Austria for its antiquity and prestige, and who,
like Lord Aberdeen, made the Caesar of Vienna the pivot on which their
ideas of policy turned. Talleyrand was one of them. He worshipped
Austria, opposed all his master's plans for crushing her, and even dared
to thwart those plans by revealing them to Alexander, and prompting him
secretly to oppose them. Such treachery fully warrants all the suspicion
and harshness with which Napoleon treated Talleyrand. The latter's
conduct is fully revealed in this volume by Lord Holland. In fact, the
way in which Napoleon found his policy most seriously counteracted, and
his projects foiled, was his weakness in employing the men of the
_ancien regime_, the nobles, whom he preferred for their pleasing and
good manners, but who invariably betrayed the _parvenu_ master, who
employed and courted them. By an instance of this grievously misplaced
confidence Napoleon lost his throne. In the last events and negotiations
of 1814 Napoleon employed Caulaincourt, who, had he had full power,
might have made an arrangement. Talleyrand and his party at the same
time employed M. de Vitrolles, and sent him to the Emperor of Austria to
learn on what terms he would be induced either to support Napoleon or
abandon him. The Emperor of Austria was naturally most unwilling to
proceed to the latter extreme. But M. Vitrolles, a secret agent of the
Bourbons, so falsified and misrepresented everything to the Emperor that
the sacrifice of Napoleon was assented to.

Our last extract relates some traits of the great NAPOLEON which seem
more than ordinarily worth his nephew's attention just now. They are
taken from a somewhat elaborate character of the Emperor which occupies
nearly a third of the volume.

"Nothing could exceed the order and regularity with which his household
both as Consul and Emperor was conducted. The great