en spent in the often
ungrateful task of making a hurried public acquainted with the
uninterrupted stream of literary production.

TAINE AND PRINCE NAPOLEON

For the last five or six months, since it has been known that a prince,
nephew, cousin, and son of emperors or kings formerly very powerful, had
proposed to answer the libel, as he calls it, written by M. Taine about
Napoleon, we have been awaiting this reply with an impatience, a
curiosity which were equally justified,--although for very different
reasons,--by M. Taine's reputation, by the glorious name of his
antagonist, by the greatness, and finally the national interest of
the subject.

The book has just appeared; and if we can say without flattery that it
has revealed to us in the Prince a writer whose existence we had not
suspected, it is because we must at once add that neither in its manner
nor in its matter is the book itself what it might have been. Prince
Napoleon did not wish to write a 'Life of Napoleon,' and nobody expected
that of him,--for after all, and for twenty different reasons, even had
he wished it he could not have done it. But to M. Taine's Napoleon,
since he did not find in him the true Napoleon, since he declared him to
be as much against nature as against history, he could, and we expected
that he would, have opposed his own Napoleon. By the side of the
"inventions of a writer whose judgment had been misled and whose
conscience had been obscured by passion,"--these are his own words,--he
could have restored, as he promised in his 'Introduction,' "the man and
his work in their living reality." And in our imaginations, on which M.
Taine's harsh and morose workmanship had engraven the features of a
modern Malatesta or modern Sforza, _he_ could at last substitute for
them, as the inheritor of the name and the dynastic claims, the image of
the founder of contemporary France, of the god of war. Unfortunately,
instead of doing so, it is M. Taine himself, it is his analytical
method, it is the witnesses whom M. Taine chose as his authorities, that
Prince Napoleon preferred to assail, as a scholar in an Academy who
descants upon the importance of the genuineness of a text, and moreover
with a freedom of utterance and a pertness of expression which on any
occasion I should venture to pronounce decidedly insulting.

For it is a misfortune of princes, when they do us the honor of
discussing with us, that they must observe a moderation, a reserve