we are to find any vitality in the literature of that period, we must
go to the ranks, not of the panegyrists, but of the opposition. There,
in the pages of Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand, we feel the throb
of life. Genius will out, of its own native force: but it cannot be
pressed out, even at a Napoleon's bidding. In vain did he endeavour to
stimulate literature by the reorganization of the Institute, and by
granting decennial prizes for the chief works and discoveries of the
decade. While science prospered, literature languished: and one of his
own remarks, as to the desirability of a public and semi-official
criticism of some great literary work, seems to suggest a reason for
this intellectual malaise:

"The public will take interest in this criticism; perhaps it will
even take sides: it matters not, as its attention will be fixed on
these interesting debates: it will talk about grammar and poetry:
taste will be improved, and our aim will be fulfilled: _out of that
will come poets and grammarians_."

And so it came to pass that, while he was rescuing a nation from chaos
and his eagles winged their flight to Naples, Lisbon, and Moscow, he
found no original thinker worthily to hymn his praises; and the chief
literary triumphs of his reign came from Chateaubriand, whom he
impoverished, and Madame de Stael, whom he drove into exile.

* * * * *

Such are the chief laws and customs which are imperishably associated
with the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. In some respects they may be
described as making for progress. Their establishment gave to the
Revolution that solidity which it had previously lacked. Among so
"inflammable" a people as the French--the epithet is Ste. Beuve's--it
was quite possible that some of the chief civil conquests of the last
decade might have been lost, had not the First Consul, to use his own
expressive phrase, "thrown in some blocks of granite." We may
intensify his metaphor and assert that out of the shifting shingle of
French life he constructed a concrete breakwater, in which his own
will acted as the binding cement, defying the storms of revolutionary
or royalist passion which had swept the incoherent atoms to and fro,
and had carried desolation far inland. Thenceforth France was able to
work out her future under the shelter of institutions which
unquestionably possess one supreme merit, that of durability. But
while the chief civic