their places:--Arch
Chancellors, Grand Electors, Constables, Grand Almoners, Grand
Chamberlains, Grand Marshals of the Palace, Masters of the Horse,
Masters of the Hounds, Madame Mere and a bevy of Imperial Highnesses
with their ladies-in-waiting. One thing only was wanting, as a Jacobin
bitterly remarked--the million of men who were slain to end all that
mummery. The fascinating story of how this amazing transformation was
effected cannot be told here. The magician who wrought it was
possessed of a soaring imagination, of a mental instrument of
incomparable force and efficiency, of an iron will, a prodigious
intellectual activity, and a piercing insight into the conditions of
material success, rarely, if ever before, united in the same degree in
one man. Napoleon Bonaparte was of ancient, patrician Florentine
blood, and perchance the descendant of one of those of Fiesole--

"In cui riviva la sementa santa
Di quei Romani che vi rimaser quando
Fu fatto il nido di malizia tanta."[172]

He cherished a particular affection for Italy, and, so far as his
personal aims allowed, treated her generously. His descent into
Lombardy awakened the slumbering sense of Italian nationality. In more
senses than one, says Mr. Bolton King the historian of Italian unity,
Napoleon was the founder of modern Italy.

[Footnote 172: _Inferno_, XV. 76-78.--"In whom lives again the seed of
those Romans who remained there when the nest (Florence) of so much
wickedness was made."]

The reason of Napoleon's success in France is not far to seek. Two
streams of effort are clearly traceable through the Revolution. The
earlier thinkers, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot
and the Encyclopedists, whose admiration for England was unbounded,
aimed at reforming the rotten state of France on the basis of the
English parliamentary and monarchical system: it was a middle-class
movement for the assertion of its interests in the state and for
political freedom. The aim of the Jacobin minority, inspired by the
doctrines of the _Contrat Social_ of Rousseau, was to found a
democratic state based on the principle of the sovereignty of the
people. If the French crown and the monarchies of Europe had allowed
the peaceful evolution of national tendencies, the Constitutional
reformers would have triumphed, but in their folly they tried to sweep
back the tide, with the result we have seen. For when everything is
put to the touch, when victory