234 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

human ability, wonderfully encourages and liber-
ates us. This capacious head, revolving and dis-
posing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating
such multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked
through Europe; this prompt invention; this inex-
haustible resource: —what events! what romantic
pictures! what strange situations I —~ when spying
the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing
up his army for battle in sight of the Pyramids,
and saying to his troops, “ From the tops of those
pyramids, forty centuries look down on you;” ford-
ing the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isth-
mus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic
projects agitated him. “ Had Acre fallen, I should
have changed the face of the world.” His army,
on the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was
the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor,
presented him with a bouquet of forty standards
taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile,
the pleasure he took in making these contrasts
glaring; as when he pleased himself with making
kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris
and at Erfurt.

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecis-
ion and indolence of men, stifficiently congratulate
ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took
occasion by the beard, and showed us how much
may be accomplished by the mere force of such vir<