press respectfully the
frozen hand of the dead. On the 8th, his household, the governor, the
admiral, and all the civil and military authorities of the place,
attended him to the grave--the pall spread over his coffin being the
military cloak which he wore at Marengo. The road not being passable for
carriages, a party of English grenadiers bore Napoleon to his tomb. The
admiral's ship fired minute guns, while Vignali read the service of his
church. The coffin then descended amidst a discharge of three volleys
from fifteen cannon; and a huge stone was lowered over the remains of
one who needs no epitaph.

* * * * *

Napoleon confessed more than once at Longwood that he owed his downfall
to nothing but the extravagance of his own errors. "It must be owned,"
said he, "that fortune spoiled me. Ere I was thirty years of age, I
found myself invested with great power, and the mover of great events."
No one, indeed, can hope to judge him fairly, either in the brilliancy
of his day or the troubled darkness of his evening, who does not task
imagination to conceive the natural effects, on a temperament and genius
so fiery and daring, of that almost instantaneous transition from
poverty and obscurity to the summit of fame, fortune, and power. The
blaze which dazzled other men's eyes, had fatal influence on his. He
began to believe that there was something superhuman in his own
faculties, and that he was privileged to deny that any laws were made
for him. Obligations by which he expected all besides to be fettered, he
considered himself entitled to snap and trample. He became a deity to
himself; and expected mankind not merely to submit to, but to admire and
reverence, the actions of a demon. Well says the Poet,

"O! more or less than man--in high or low,
Battling with nations, flying from the field;
Now making monarchs' necks thy footstool, now
More than thy meanest soldier taught to yield;
An empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild,
But govern not thy pettiest passion, nor,
However deeply in, men's spirits skilled,
Look through thine own--nor curb the lust of war,
Nor learn that tempted fate will leave the loftiest star."

His heart was naturally cold. His school-companion, who was afterwards
his secretary, confesses that, even in the spring of youth, he was very
little disposed to form friendships.[75] To say that he was incapable of
such feelings, or th