ce homo," and felt its allusion
to his citizenship, not in Germany, but in the world. The
nineteenth-century Caesar then urged the great writer to carry out an
already-formed design and compose a drama on the life of his own great
prototype; such a work, he was sure, would be worthier of the theme
than Voltaire's effort. At St. Cloud Napoleon had once paid a glowing
eulogy to the power of tragic dramas, and, speaking of Corneille,
declared that to his inspiration the French nation owed many of its
finest impulses and its most brilliant deeds. "If he were here, I
would make him a prince." To Goethe he now said that in art, as in
politics, there should be rule and ordered beauty; apropos of the
drama imitated from Shakspere, which mingles tragedy and comedy, the
terrible with the burlesque, he expressed surprise that a great mind
like Goethe's did not like clean-cut models--"N'aime pas les genres
tranches." These two judgments, taken together, give a valuable
picture of Napoleon's mind.

Amid the brilliant scenes arranged for the entertainment of Napoleon
in the stately little town of Weimar, when surrounded by that German
aristocracy which he had humbled, he summoned to his presence the man
who in the two periods of his career personified first the strength
and then the weakness of the German folk--the aged Wieland. Indeed,
the Emperor's conversation throughout that excursion to Weimar was
chiefly of learning, as if he bowed before German knowledge, German
science, German letters. He had studied much, he said, in the
barracks, "when I was a young lieutenant of artillery," and his cold,
piercing glance seemed to search the very hearts of the proud princes
and dukes who crowded around and literally stood at his chair in
domestic service. It was at the ball given by the Grand Duchess that
he asked for Wieland. During the evening this gentle and now temperate
old man had been present while the actors of the French comedy,
brought among other decorative trappings from Paris, had declaimed the
"Death of Caesar" from the stage of the ducal theater; he had listened
to Talma's significant utterance of the words, "Rule without violence
over a conquered universe," and then, wearied by the excitement of
these strange experiences, had withdrawn from further revelry. The
Grand Duchess of Weimar, anxious to gratify her great guest, sent her
carriage to fetch the author of "Oberon"; and rather than detain the
illustrious dictator, the