is he right at the bottom? I do not know anything about
it; I do not _wish_ to know anything; I do not need it, since I _know_,
from other sources, that 'Bourrienne's Memoirs' are hardly less spurious
than, say, the 'Souvenirs of the Marquise de Crequi' or the 'Memoirs of
Monsieur d'Artagnan.' But if these so-called 'Memoirs' are really not
his, what has Bourrienne himself to do here? and suppose the former
secretary of the First Consul to have been, instead of the shameless
embezzler whom Prince Napoleon so fully and so uselessly describes to
us, the most honest man in the world, would the 'Memoirs' be any more
reliable, since it is a fact that _he_ wrote nothing? ...

And now I cannot but wonder at the tone in which those who contradict M.
Taine, and especially Prince Napoleon himself, condescend to tell him
that he lacks that which would be needed in order to speak of Napoleon
or the Revolution. But who is it, then, that _has_ what is needed in
order to judge Napoleon? Frederick the Great, or Catherine II.,
perhaps,--as Napoleon himself desired, "his peers"; or in other words,
those who, born as he was for war and government, can only admire,
justify, and glorify themselves in him. And who will judge the
Revolution? Danton. we suppose, or Robespierre,--that is, the men who
were the Revolution itself. No: the real judge will be the average
opinion of men; the force that will create, modify, correct this average
opinion, the historians will be; and among the historians of our time,
in spite of Prince Napoleon, it will be M. Taine for a large share.

THE LITERATURES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND GERMANY

Twice at least in the course of their long history, it is known that the
literature and even the language of France has exerted over the whole of
Europe an influence, whose universal character other languages perhaps
more harmonious,--Italian for instance,--and other literatures more
original in certain respects, like English literature, have never
possessed. It is in a purely French form that our mediaeval poems, our
'Chansons de Geste,' our 'Romances of the Round Table,' our _fabliaux_
themselves, whencesoever they came,--Germany or Tuscany, England or
Brittany, Asia or Greece,--conquered, fascinated, charmed, from one end
of Europe to the other, the imaginations of the Middle Ages. The
amorous languor and the subtlety of our "courteous poetry" are breathed
no less by the madrigals of Shakespeare himself than by Petra