distributed 52,300
francs per annum to the literati and artists of
France, and 14,000 francs to foreigners.]

At the same moment his sovereign will guided the hands which curbed
the waves of the ocean, and caused them to roll over a new abyss. He
directed those labours which substituted wide harbours, superb
dock-yards, and fertilizing canals, in the place of desert shores and
pestilential marshes, restoring commerce and existence to the
innumerable inhabitants of the sea coast, and of the banks of the
Scheld and the Somme. At the same moment his voice created those Roman
highways, branching through all parts of France, and Germany, and
Italy, equally useful and majestic, and which afforded to the
inhabitants of those countries means equally speedy and secure of
communicating with each other, and of exchanging the products of their
industry: and never will the friend or even the enemy of Napoleon
cross the summits of the Alps, or ascend their craggy sides, without
venerating the magnanimous sovereign, who, anxious to guide the steps
and protect the life of the traveller, has enclosed the precipice,
chained the torrent, and linked the great mountains of the earth,
which during so many ages have braved the might of man and time. When
future ages shall gather up in memory the glorious and transcendent
deeds of Napoleon; when they shall number the blessings which he
dispensed, and the victories which he gained, never will they believe
that one man can have worked such miracles in so short a period. They
will rather fancy that the historian was playing with the credulity of
posterity, that he culled out all the great deeds performed by
successive generations of the greatest men during an infinite series
of ages, and that he has attributed them all to his ideal hero.

The soldiers who had bled beneath the banners of Napoleon would not
listen in silence to the praises which others bestowed upon his name.
His foreign conquests, which even they had lately considered as the
causes of our misfortunes, became again the sources of inexhaustible
admiration.

They recollected that Napoleon had ruled as the master of Madrid, of
Lisbon, of Munich, of Warsaw, of Hamburgh, of Berlin, of Vienna, of
Milan, of Amsterdam, of Rome, of Moscow, of Cairo.

Some recalled the memory of the day of Lodi. They saw him standing on
the bridge re-animating his dispirited followers, defying danger and
death whil