We have still
to glance for a moment at Napoleon, our second modern King.

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as Cromwell. His
enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode
mainly in our little England, are but as the high _stilts_ on which
the man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered
thereby. I find in him no such _sincerity_ as In Cromwell; only a far
inferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with the Awful
Unnamable of this Universe; 'walking with God,' as he called it; and
faith and strength in that alone: _latent_ thought and valour, content
to lie latent, then burst out as in blaze of Heaven's lightning!
Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer believed; the meaning
of all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to begin
not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical
_Encyclopedies_. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious
to get so far. His compact, prompt, everyway articulate character is
in itself perhaps small, compared with our great chaotic inarticulate
Cromwell's. Instead of '_dumb_ Prophet struggling to speak,' we have a
portentous mixture of the Quack withal! Hume's notion of the
Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better
to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like,--where
indeed taken strictly it has hardly any truth at all. An element of
blamable ambition shows itself, from the first, in this man; gets the
victory over him at last, and involves him and his work in ruin.

'False as a bulletin' became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He makes
what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the
enemy, to keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the whole,
there are no excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell lies. It
had been, in the long-run, _better_ for Napoleon too if he had not
told any. In fact, if a man have any purpose reaching beyond the hour
and day, meant to be found extant _next_ day, what good can it ever be
to promulgate lies? The lies are found-out; ruinous penalty is exacted
for them. No man will believe the liar next time even when he speaks
truth, when it is of the last importance that he be believed. The old
cry of wolf!--A Lie is _no_-thing; you cannot of nothing make
something; you make _nothing_ at last, and lose your labour into the
bargain.

Yet Napoleon _had_ a sincerity; we are to distinguish between