ong delusion, that he should believe a lie;' a
fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true from false now when
he looked at them,--the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to
untruth of heart. _Self_ and false ambition had now become his god:
_self_-deception once yielded to, _all_ other deceptions follow
naturally more and more. What a paltry patch-work of theatrical
paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapt his own great
reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollow
Pope's-_Concordat_, pretending to be a re-establishment of
Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, "_la
vaccine de la religion_:" his ceremonial Coronations, consecrations by
the old Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame,--"wanting nothing to complete
the pomp of it," as Augereau said, "nothing but the half-million of
men who had died to put an end to all that"! Cromwell's Inauguration
was by the Sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely _true_ one.
Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera: were not
these the _real_ emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration and
insignia? It had used them both in a very real manner, and pretended
to stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook: he believed too
much in the _Dupeability_ of men; saw no fact deeper in men than
Hunger and this! He was mistaken. Like a man that should build upon
cloud; his house and he fall down in confused wreck, and depart out of
the world.

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and _might_ be
developed, were the temptation strong enough. 'Lead us not into
temptation'! But it is fatal, I say, that it _be_ developed. The thing
into which it enters as a cognisable ingredient is doomed to be
altogether transitory; and, however huge it may _look_, is in itself
small. Napoleon's working, accordingly, what was it with all the noise
it made? A flash as of gunpowder wide-spread; a blazing-up as of dry
heath. For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame;
but only for an hour. It goes out: the Universe with its old mountains
and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of courage; this
Napoleonism was _unjust_, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true
doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it
tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be,
one day. Injustice pays