of London were already chiming for the coronation
of George the Fourth, the most powerful enemy George's country had ever
had was passing quietly away in St. Helena. On May 5, 1821, the
Emperor Napoleon died in his island exile. No words could exaggerate
the sensation produced through the whole world by the close of this
marvellous career. He was unquestionably one of the greatest figures
in history. As a conquering soldier he has no rival in the modern
world, and indeed all the history we know of, ancient or modern, can
give but very few names which may bear comparison with his. Unlike
Caesar and Alexander, he had made his way from the humble obscurity of
common life, and, unlike Caesar, he did not seem to have had in him the
intellectual greatness which must have made him, under any conditions,
a master of men and of hemispheres. So far as mere dramatic effect is
concerned, he was less fortunate than Caesar in his disappearance from
the world's stage. Napoleon was doomed to pine and wither away on a
lonely island in the South Atlantic for years and years, and there was
something like an anticlimax in the closing scenes of that marvellous
life-drama. It is pitiful and saddening now to read of the trumpery
annoyances and humiliations to which his days of exile were subjected,
and to read, too, of the unceasing complaints with which he resented
what he regarded as the insults offered to him by his jailers. There
was, indeed, much that was ignoble in the manner of his treatment by
those who had him in charge, in the paltry indignities which he had to
endure, and which he could not endure in the patient dignity of
silence. The mere refusal to allow to him his title of Emperor, and to
insist {13} that he should only be addressed as General Bonaparte, was
as illogical as it was ungenerous; for if revolutionary France had not
the right to make him an Emperor, she certainly could not have had the
right to make him a General. Every movement he made and every movement
made by any of his friends on the island was watched as jealously and
as closely as if he had been some vulgar Jack Sheppard plotting with
his pals for an escape through the windows or the cellars of his prison.

One cannot but regret that Napoleon could not have folded himself in
the majestic mantle of his dignity and his fame, could not even, if it
were needed, have eaten out his own heart in silence, and left his
captors to work their worst upon him wi