brilliancy of French
soldiership, in a war which swept Europe with the swiftness and the
devastation of a flight of locusts--the British campaigns of the
Peninsula, those most consummate displays of fortitude and decision, of
the science which baffles an enemy, and of the bravery which crushes
him--will be lessons to the soldier in every period to come.

But the foremost figure of the great history-piece of revolution, was
the man, of whose latter hours we are now contemplating. Napoleon may
not have been the ablest statesman, or the most scientific soldier, or
the most resistless conqueror, or the most magnificent monarch of
mankind--but what man of his day so closely combined all those
characters, and was so distinguished in them all? It is idle to call him
the child of chance--it is false to call his power the creation of
opportunity--it is trifling with the common understanding of man, to
doubt his genius. He was one of those few men, who are formed to guide
great changes in the affairs of nations. The celebrity of his early
career, and the support given to him by the disturbances of France, are
nothing in the consideration of the philosopher; or perhaps they but
separate him more widely from the course of things, and assimilate him
more essentially with those resistless influences of nature, which,
rising from we know not what, and operating we know not how, execute the
penalties of Heaven:--those moral pestilences which, like the physical,
springing from some spot of obscurity, and conveyed by the contact of
the obscure, suddenly expand into universal contagion, and lay waste the
mind of nations.

In the earlier volumes of the Journal of Count Montholon, the assistance
of Las Cases was used to collect the imperial _dicta_. But on the
baron's being sent away from St Helena--an object which he appears to
have sought with all the eagerness of one determined to make his escape,
yet equally resolved on turning that escape into a subject of
complaint--the duty of recording Napoleon's opinions devolved on
Montholon. In the year 1818, Napoleon's health began visibly to break.
His communications with O'Meara, the surgeon appointed by the English
government, became more frequent; and as Napoleon was never closely
connected with any individual without an attempt to make him a partisan,
the governor's suspicions were excited by this frequency of intercourse.
We by no means desire to stain the memory of O'Meara (he is since d