ress to the capital. In the _Ode to
Napoleon Buonaparte_, which was written in April, 1814, after the first
abdication at Fontainebleau, the dominant note is astonishment mingled
with contempt. It is the lamentation over a fallen idol. In these
stanzas (xxxvi.-xlv.) he bears witness to the man's essential greatness,
and, with manifest reference to his own personality and career,
attributes his final downfall to the peculiar constitution of his genius
and temper. A year later (1817), in the Fourth Canto (stanzas
lxxxix.-xcii.), he passes a severe sentence. Napoleon's greatness is
swallowed up in weakness. He is a "kind of bastard Caesar,"
self-vanquished, the creature and victim of vanity. Finally, in The Age
of Bronze, sections iii.-vi., there is a reversion to the same theme,
the tragic irony of the rise and fall of the "king of kings, and yet of
slaves the slave."

As a schoolboy at Harrow, Byron fought for the preservation of
Napoleon's bust, and he was ever ready, in defiance of national feeling
and national prejudice, to celebrate him as "the glorious chief;" but
when it came to the point, he did not "want him here," victorious over
England, and he could not fail to see, with insight quickened by
self-knowledge, that greatness and genius possess no charm against
littleness and commonness, and that the "glory of the terrestrial" meets
with its own reward. The moral is obvious, and as old as history; but
herein lay the secret of Byron's potency, that he could remint and issue
in fresh splendour the familiar coinage of the world's wit. Moreover, he
lived in a great age, when great truths are born again, and appear in a
new light.]

[299] [The stanza was written while Napoleon was still under the
guardianship of Admiral Sir George Cockburn, and before Sir Hudson Lowe
had landed at St. Helena; but complaints were made from the first that
imperial honours which were paid to him by his own suite were not
accorded by the British authorities.]

[hv] {239}
----_and thy dark name_
_Was ne'er more rife within men's mouths than now_.--[MS.]

[hw] _Who tossed thee to and fro till_----.--[MS. erased.]

[hx] _Which be it wisdom, weakness_----.--[MS.]

[hy]
_To watch thee shrinking calmly hadst thou smiled._--[MS.]
_With a sedate tho' not unfeeling eye._--[MS. erased.]

[hz] {241}
_Greater than in thy fortunes; for in them_
_Ambition lured thee on too far to show_
_That true habitual scorn_--