rly untenable
position. Even the steel-like will of Buonaparte was bent. His career
in Corsica was at an end for the present; and with his kith and kin he
set sail for France.

The interest of the events above described lies, not in their
intrinsic importance, but in the signal proof which they afford of
Buonaparte's wondrous endowments of mind and will. In a losing cause
and in a petty sphere he displays all the qualities which, when the
omens were favourable, impelled him to the domination of a Continent.
He fights every inch of ground tenaciously; at each emergency he
evinces a truly Italian fertility of resource, gliding round obstacles
or striving to shatter them by sheer audacity, seeing through men,
cajoling them by his insinuations or overawing them by his mental
superiority, ever determined to try the fickle jade Fortune to the
very utmost, and retreating only before the inevitable. The sole
weakness discoverable in this nature, otherwise compact of strength,
is an excess of will-power over all the faculties that make for
prudence. His vivid imagination only serves to fire him with the full
assurance that he must prevail over all obstacles.

And yet, if he had now stopped to weigh well the lessons of the past,
hitherto fertile only in failures and contradictions, he must have
seen the powerlessness of his own will when in conflict with the
forces of the age; for he had now severed his connection with the
Corsican patriots, of whose cause he had only two years before been
the most passionate champion. It is evident that the schism which
finally separated Buonaparte and Paoli originated in their divergence
of views regarding the French Revolution. Paoli accepted revolutionary
principles only in so far as they promised to base freedom on a due
balance of class interests. He was a follower of Montesquieu. He
longed to see in Corsica a constitution similar to that of England or
to that of 1791 in France. That hope vanished alike for France and
Corsica after the fall of the monarchy; and towards the Jacobinical
Republic, which banished orthodox priests and guillotined the amiable
Louis, Paoli thenceforth felt naught but loathing: "We have been the
enemies of kings," he said to Joseph Buonaparte; "let us never be
their executioners." Thenceforth he drifted inevitably into alliance
with England.

Buonaparte, on the other hand, was a follower of Rousseau, whose ideas
leaped to power at the downfall of the monarchy.