r last without such. To bridle in that great devouring,
self-devouring French Revolution; to _tame_ it, so that its intrinsic
purpose can be made good, that it may become _organic_, and be able
to live among other organisms and _formed_ things, not as a wasting
destruction alone: is not this still what he partly aimed at, as the
true purport of his life; nay what he actually managed to do? Through
Wagrams, Austerlitzes; triumph after triumph,--he triumphed so far.
There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do. He rose
naturally to be the King. All men saw that he _was_ such. The common
soldiers used to say on the march: "These babbling _Avocats_, up at
Paris; all talk and no work! What wonder it runs all wrong? We shall
have to go and put our _Petit Caporal_ there!" They went, and put him
there; they and France at large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory
over Europe;--till the poor Lieutenant of _La Fere_, not unnaturally,
might seem to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world
for some ages.

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upper
hand. He apostatized from his old faith in Facts, took to believing in
Semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian Dynasties,
Popedoms, with the old false Feudalities which he once saw clearly to
be false;--considered that _he_ would found "his Dynasty" and so forth;
that the enormous French Revolution meant only that! The man was "given
up to strong delusion, that he should believe a lie;" a fearful but
most sure thing. He did not know true from false now when he looked
at them,--the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of
heart. _Self_ and false ambition had now become his god: self-deception
once yielded to, _all_ other deceptions follow naturally more and more.
What a paltry patchwork of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery,
had this man wrapt his own great reality in, thinking to make it
more real thereby! His hollow _Pope's-Concordat_, pretending to be a
re-establishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method
of extirpating it, "_la vaccine de la religion_:" his ceremonial
Coronations, consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in
Notre-Dame,--"wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it," as Augereau
said, "nothing but the half-million of men who had died to put an end to
all that"! Cromwell's Inauguration was by the Sword and Bible; what we
must call a genuinely _true_ one. Sword