what is
superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity. Across these outer
manoeuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blamable,
let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive
ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, so
long as he had any basis. He has an instinct of Nature better than his
culture was. His _savans_, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to
Egypt were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no
God. They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all manner of
logic. Napoleon looking up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious,
Messieurs: but _who made_ all that?" The Atheistic logic runs-off from
him like water; the great Fact stares him in the face: "Who made all
that?" So too in Practice: he, as every man that can be great, or have
victory in this world, sees, through all entanglements, the practical
heart of the matter; drives straight towards that. When the steward of
his Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises,
and demonstration how glorious it was, and how cheap withal, Napoleon,
making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clipt one of the
gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked
on. Some days afterwards, he produced it at the right moment, to the
horror of his upholstery functionary; it was not gold but tinsel! In
Saint Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on
the practical, the real. "Why talk and complain; above all, why
quarrel with one another? There is no _result_ in it; it comes to
nothing that one can _do_. Say nothing, if one can do nothing!" He
speaks often so, to his poor discontented followers; he is like a
piece of silent strength in the middle of their morbid querulousness
there.

And accordingly was there not what we can call a _faith_ in him,
genuine so far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy asserting
itself here in the French Revolution is an insuppressible Fact, which
the whole world, with its old forces and institutions cannot put down;
this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm
along with it,--a _faith_. And did he not interpret the dim purport of
it well? '_La carriere ouverte aux talens_, The implements to him who
can handle them:' this actually is the truth, and even the whole
truth; it includes whatever the French Revolution, or any Revolution,
could mean. Napoleon, in his first per