do, Napoleon might have cut the root
away from one long series of his subsequent disputes with the English
government and authorities. But in doing as he did, he acted on
calculation. He never laid aside the hopes of escape and of empire. It
was his business to have complaints. If everything went on quietly and
smoothly about him, what was to ensure the keeping up of a lively
interest in his fortunes among the faction, to which he still looked as
inclined to befriend him, and above all, among the soldiery, of whose
personal devotion, even after the fatal catastrophe of Waterloo, he had
no reason to doubt? Buonaparte, in his days of success, always attached
more importance to etiquette than a prince born to the purple, and not
quite a fool, would have been likely to do: but in the obstinacy with
which, after his total downfall, he clung to the airy sound of majesty,
and such pigmy toys of observance as could be obtained under his
circumstances, we cannot persuade ourselves to behold no more than the
sickly vanity of a _parvenu_. The English government acknowledged him by
the highest military rank he had held at that time when the treaty of
Amiens was concluded with him as First Consul; and the sound of _General
Buonaparte_, now so hateful in his ears, who had under that style
wielded the destinies of the world, might have been lost, if Napoleon
himself had chosen, in some factitious style.

To come to the more serious charges. Napoleon, driven to extremity in
1814 by the united armies of Europe, abdicated his throne, that
abdication being the price of peace to France, and to soothe his
personal sufferings, obtained the sovereignty of Elba. When he violated
the treaty by returning in arms to Provence, the other provisions, which
gave peace to France and Elba to him, were annulled of course. When the
fortune of Waterloo compelled him to take refuge in the
_Bellerophon_--what was to be done? To replace in Elba, or any similar
situation, under some new treaty, the man who had just broken a most
solemn one, was out of the question. To let him remain at large in the
midst of a country close to France, wherein the press is free to
licentiousness, and the popular mind liable to extravagant agitations,
would have been to hazard the domestic tranquillity of England, and
throw a thousand new difficulties in the way of every attempt to
consolidate the social and political system of the French monarchy. In
most other times the bulle