did, who killed himself that-a-way at North Cray in Kent--God damn
him!"

I felt that the man's hand trembled and, fearing lest he might imagine,
in his excitement, that I really was the Duke of Wellington, I
endeavored to allay his violence, and, in an underhand manner to soothe
him, I called up his national pride; I represented to him that the Duke
of Wellington had advanced the glory of the English, that he had always
been an innocent tool in the hands of others, that he was fond of
beefsteak, and that he finally--but the Lord only knows what fine things
I said of Wellington as I felt that razor tickling around my throat!

What vexes me most is the reflection that Wellington will be as immortal
as Napoleon Bonaparte. It is true that, in like manner, the name of
Pontius Pilate will be as little likely to be forgotten as that of
Christ. Wellington and Napoleon! It is a wonderful phenomenon that the
human mind can at the same time think of both these names. There can be
no greater contrast than the two, even in their external appearance.
Wellington, the dumb ghost, with an ashy-gray soul in a buckram body, a
wooden smile on his freezing face--and, by the side of _that_, think of
the figure of Napoleon, every inch a god!

That figure never disappears from my memory. I still see him, high on
his steed, with eternal eyes in his marble-like, imperial face, glancing
calm as destiny on the Guards defiling past--he was then sending them to
Russia, and the old Grenadiers glanced up at him so terribly devoted, so
all-consciously serious, so proud in death--

"Te, Caesar, morituri, salutant."

There often steals over me a secret doubt whether I ever really saw him,
if we were ever contemporaries, and then it seems to me as if his
portrait, torn from the little frame of the present, vanished away more
proudly and imperiously in the twilight of the past. His name even now
sounds to us like a word of the early world, and as antique and as
heroic as those of Alexander and Caesar. It has already become a
rallying word among races, and when the East and the West meet they
fraternize on that single name.

I once felt, in the deepest manner, how significantly and magically that
name can sound. It was in the harbor of London, at the India Docks, and
on board an East India-man just arrived from Bengal. It was a giant-like
ship, fully manned with Hindoos. The grotesque forms and groups, the
singularly variegated dresses, the enigmatic