capable of friendship, and never forgot those who had rendered him services or kindness in his wanderings.  Nor was he greedy of money like Louis Philippe, but freely lavished it on his generals.  Like his uncle, he had an antipathy to literary men when they would not condescend to flatter him, which was repaid by uncompromising hostility on their part.  How savage and unrelenting was the hatred of Victor Hugo!  How unsparing his ridicule and abuse!  He called the usurper “Napoleon the Little,” notwithstanding he had outwitted the leading men of the nation and succeeded in establishing himself on an absolute throne.  A small man could not have shown so much patience, wisdom, and prudence as Louis Napoleon showed when President, or fought so successfully the legislative body when it was arrayed against him.  If the poet had called him “Napoleon the Wicked” it would have been more to the point, for only a supremely unscrupulous and dishonest man could have meditated and executed the coup d’etat.  His usurpation and treachery were gigantic crimes, accompanied with violence and murder.  Even his crimes, however, were condoned in view of the good government which he enforced and the services he rendered; showing that, if he was dishonest and treacherous, he was also able and enlightened.

But it is not his usurpation of supreme power for which Louis Napoleon will be most severely judged by his country and by posterity.  Cromwell was a usurper, and yet he is regarded as a great benefactor.  It was the policy which Napoleon III. pursued as a supreme ruler for which he will be condemned, and which was totally unlike that of Cromwell or Augustus.  It was his policy to embroil nations in war and play the role of a conqueror.  The policy of the restored Bourbons and of Louis Philippe was undeniably that of peace with other nations, and the relinquishment of that aggrandizement which is gained by successful war.  It was this policy,—­upheld by such great statesmen as Guizot and Thiers,—­conflicting with the warlike instincts of the French people, which made those monarchs unpopular more than their attempts to suppress the liberty of the Press and the license of popular leaders; and it was the appeal to the military vanity of the people which made Napoleon III. popular, and secured his political ascendency.

The quarrel which was then going on between the Greek and Latin monks for the possession of the sacred shrines at Jerusalem furnished both the occasion and the pretence for interrupting the peace of Europe, as has been already stated in the Lecture on the Crimean war.  The French usurper determined to take the side of the Latin monks, which would necessarily embroil him with the great protector of the Greek faith, even the Emperor Nicholas, who was a bigot in all matters pertaining to his religion.  He would rally the French nation in a crusade, not merely to get possession of a sacred key and a silver star, but to come to the