aid Madame de Stael, was "like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful
artist, and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the Assembly
on April 2, 1791, the President announced, amid murmurs, "Ah! il est
mort," which anticipated his words, that Gabriel-Honore Riquetti was
dead.

"The 18th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced the orators. For
fifteen years a solitary voice was heard, imperious but eloquent....
Napoleon was the last of the great Revolutionary orators." As he
advanced in power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, and
condensed his summons to action into direct, effective words, now
simple and going straight at some motive of self-interest, now
grandiose to seduce the imagination to his side. Speech with Napoleon
was a means of government, and he knew the temper of the men whom
he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched with
sentimentality; _Ossian_ and _Werther_ were among his favourite
books; but what may be styled the official literature of the Empire
was of the decaying classical or neo-classical tradition.

Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct offspring of the
Revolution with its social contract and its rights of man, it was
necessary to combat eighteenth-century ideas and defend the throne
and the altar. Great scientific names--Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier,
Lamarck--testify to the fact that a movement which made the eighteenth
century illustrious had not spent its force. Scholarship was laying
the bases for future constructions; Ginguene published in 1811 the
first volumes of his _Histoire Litteraire de l'Italie_; Fauriel and
Raynouard accumulated the materials for their historical, literary,
and philological studies. Philosophy was turning away from
sensationalism, which seemed to have said its final word, towards
spiritualist conceptions. Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in the
primitive fact of consciousness--the _nisus_ of the will--and in the
self-recognition of the _ego_ as a cause, an escape from materialism.
Royer-Collard (1763-1845), afterwards more distinguished in
politics than he was in speculation, read for his class at the Sorbonne
from the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his commentary
as a siege-train against the positions of Condillac.

The germs of new literary growths were in the soil; but the spring
came slowly, and after the storms of Revolution were spent, a chill
was in the air. Measureless hopes, and what had come of the