ave infallibly become the senior if he had gone
on as he began.

I will relate a little circumstance which now occurs to me respecting the
kings manufactured by Napoleon. I recollect that during the King of
Etruria's stay in Paris--the First Consul went with that Prince to the
Comedie Francaise, where Voltaire's 'OEdipus' was performed. This piece,
I may observe, Bonaparte liked better than anything Voltaire ever wrote.
I was in the theatre, but not in the First Consul's box, and I observed,
as all present must have done, the eagerness with which the audience
applied to Napoleon and the King of Etruria the line in which Philoctetes
says--

"J'ai fait des souverains et n'ai pas voulu l'etre."

["I have made sovereigns, but have not wished to be one myself."]

The application was so marked that it could not fail to become the
subject of conversation between the First Consul and me. "You remarked
it, Bourrienne?" . . . "Yes, General." . . "The fools! . . .
They shall see! They shall see!" We did indeed see. Not content with
making kings, Bonaparte, when his brow was encircled by a double crown,
after creating princes at length realised the object he had long
contemplated, namely, to found a new nobility endowed with hereditary
rights. It was at the commencement of March 1808 that he accomplished
this project; and I saw in the 'Moniteur' a long list of princes, dukes,
counts, barons, and knights of the Empire; there were wanting only
viscounts and marquises.

At the same time that Bonaparte was founding a new nobility he determined
to raise up the old edifice of the university, but on a new foundation.
The education of youth had always been one of his ruling ideas, and I had
an opportunity of observing how he was changed by the exercise of
sovereign power when I received at Hamburg the statutes of the new elder
daughter of the Emperor of the French, and compared them with the ideas
which Bonaparte, when General and First Consul, had often expressed to me
respecting the education which ought to be given youth. Though the sworn
enemy of everything like liberty, Bonaparte had at first conceived a vast
system of education, comprising above all the study of history, and those
positive sciences, such as geology and astronomy, which give the utmost
degree of development to the human mind. The Sovereign, however, shrunk
from the first ideas of the man of genius, and his university, confided
to the elegant suppleness of