atic wiles, he was capable of soaring to heights of
imaginative reverence. Such an episode, lighting up for us the
recesses of his mind, occurred during his voyage to Egypt. The
_savants_ on board his ship, "L'Orient," were discussing one of those
questions which Bonaparte often propounded, in order that, as arbiter
in this contest of wits, he might gauge their mental powers. Mental
dexterity, rather than the Socratic pursuit after truth, was the aim
of their dialectic; but on one occasion, when religion was being
discussed, Bonaparte sounded a deeper note: looking up into the
midnight vault of sky, he said to the philosophizing atheists: "Very
ingenious, sirs, but who made all that?" As a retort to the
tongue-fencers, what could be better? The appeal away from words to
the star-studded canopy was irresistible: it affords a signal proof of
what Carlyle has finely called his "instinct for nature" and his
"ineradicable feeling for reality." This probably was the true man,
lying deep under his Moslem shifts and Concordat bargainings.

That there was a tinge of superstition in Bonaparte's nature, such as
usually appears in gifted scions of a coast-dwelling family, cannot be
denied;[101] but his usual attitude towards religion was that of the
political mechanician, not of the devotee, and even while professing
the forms of fatalistic belief, he really subordinated them to his own
designs. To this profound calculation of the credulity of mankind we
may probably refer his allusions to his star. The present writer
regards it as almost certain that his star was invoked in order to
dazzle the vulgar herd. Indeed, if we may trust Miot de Melito, the
First Consul once confessed as much to a circle of friends. "Caesar,"
he said, "was right to cite his good fortune and to appear to believe
in it. That is a means of acting on the imagination of others without
offending anyone's self-love." A strange admission this; what
boundless self-confidence it implies that he should have admitted the
trickery. The mere acknowledgment of it is a proof that he felt
himself so far above the plane of ordinary mortals that, despite the
disclosure, he himself would continue to be his own star. For the
rest, is it credible that this analyzing genius could ever have
seriously adopted the astrologer's creed? Is there anything in his
early note-books or later correspondence which warrants such a belief?
Do not all his references to his star occur in procla