that he thought there was something in his character and exploits to give a color to his—­blasphemous pretensions.  The empire of the world seemed to him to be in a measure his due, for nothing short of it corresponded with his conceptions of himself; and he did not use mere verbiage, but spoke a language to which he gave some credit, when he called his successive conquests “the fulfilment of his destiny.”  This spirit of self-exaggeration wrought its own misery, and drew down upon him terrible punishments; and this it did by vitiating and perverting his high powers.  First, it diseased his fine intellect, gave imagination the ascendency over judgment, turned the inventiveness and fruitfulness of his mind into rash, impatient, restless energies, and thus precipitated him into projects, which, as the wisdom of his counsellors pronounced, were fraught with ruin.  To a man, whose vanity took him out of the rank of human beings, no foundation for reasoning was left.  All things seemed possible.  His genius and his fortune were not to be bounded by the barriers which experience had assigned to human powers.  Ordinary rules did not apply to him.  He even found excitement and motives in obstacles before which other men would have wavered; for these would enhance the glory of triumph, and give a new thrill to the admiration of the world.

To us there is something radically and increasingly shocking in the thought of one man’s will becoming a law to his race; in the thought of multitudes, of vast communities, surrendering conscience, intellect, their affections, their rights, their interests, to the stern mandate of a fellow-creature.  When we see one word of a frail man on the throne of France, tearing a hundred thousand sons from their homes, breaking asunder the sacred ties of domestic life, sentencing myriads of the young to make murder their calling, and rapacity their means of support, and extorting from nations their treasures to extend this ruinous sway, we are ready to ask ourselves, Is not this a dream? and, when the sad reality comes home to us, we blush for a race which can stoop to such an abject lot.  At length, indeed, we see the tyrant humbled, stripped of power, but stripped by those who, in the main, are not unwilling to play the despot on a narrower scale, and to break down the spirit of nations under the same iron sway.

* * * * *

=_Manning._=

From a Discourse upon Immortality.

=_25._= GRANDEUR OF THE PROSPECT.

To me there is but one objection against immortality, if objection it may be called, and this arises from the very greatness of the truth.  My mind sometimes sinks under its weight, is lost in its immensity; I scarcely dare believe that such a good is placed within my reach.  When I think of myself, as existing through all future ages, as surviving this earth and that sky, as exempted from every imperfection and error of my present being, as clothed with an angel’s