o repress wonder in listening to this
particular subject of complaint. Passing over this original quarrel--it
appears that, according to Buonaparte's own admission, Sir H. Lowe
endeavoured, when he took his thankless office upon him, to place the
intercourse between himself and his prisoner on a footing as gracious as
could well be looked for under all the circumstances of the case; and
that he, the ex-emperor, ere the governor had been a week at St. Helena,
condescended to insult him to his face by language so extravagantly,
intolerably, and vulgarly offensive, as never ought, under any
circumstances whatever, to have stained the lips of one who made any
pretension to the character of a gentleman. Granting that Sir Hudson
Lowe was not an officer of the first distinction--it must be admitted
that he did no wrong in accepting a duty offered to him by his
government; and that Napoleon was guilty, not only of indecorum, but of
meanness, in reproaching a man so situated, as he did almost at their
first interview, with the circumstances--of which at worst it could but
be said that they were not splendid--of his previous life. But this is
far too little. Granting that Sir Hudson Lowe had been in history and in
conduct, both before he came to St. Helena and during his stay there,
all that the most ferocious libels of the Buonapartists have ever dared
to say or to insinuate--it would still remain a theme of unmixed wonder
and regret, that Napoleon Buonaparte should have stooped to visit on his
head the wrongs which, if they were wrongs, proceeded not from the
governor of St. Helena, but from the English ministry, whose servant he
was. "I can only account," says Mr. Ellis, "for his petulance and
unfounded complaints from one of two motives--either he wishes by these
means to keep alive an interest in Europe, and more especially in
England, where he flatters himself he has a party; or his troubled mind
finds an occupation in the tracasseries which his present conduct gives
to the governor. If the latter be the case, it is in vain for any
governor to unite being on good terms with him to the performance of his
duty."

Napoleon did everything he could to irritate this unfortunate governor.
He called him _scrivener, thieftaker, liar, hangman_; rejected all his
civilities as insults; encouraged his attendants to rival in these
particulars the audacity of his own language and conduct; refused by
degrees to take the exercise which his