[Footnote A:  A History of the Romans under the Empire.  By CHARLES MERIVALE, B.D., late Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge.  Vol.  VI., pp. 224-231.]

Flattery has discovered a resemblance between the career of Napoleon III. and the career of Augustus, and it required the eyes of flattery to make such a discovery.  The Frenchman is the equal of the Roman in talent, but the resemblance goes no farther.  What resemblance can there be between the boy who became a statesman at twenty and the man who began his career at forty? between the youth who made himself master of the Roman situation in a few months and the elderly man whose position at fifty-three is by no means an assured one? between the man who at thirty-three had destroyed all rivals and competitors, and gathered into his person all the powers of the State, and the man who at a much later period of life is still engaged upon an experiment in politics?  Augustus avenged the murder of Julius within a brief time after it had been perpetrated; Napoleon III. has never avenged the fall of his uncle, but has refrained from injuring his uncle’s destroyers, when, apparently, he might have done so with profit to himself, and with the general approbation of the world.  Augustus’s public life knew but one signal calamity, the loss of the legions of Varus, which happened toward its close, and in his dying moments he could congratulate himself on having played well, which meant successfully, his part in the drama of life.  Napoleon III.’s life has been full of calamities, and it remains yet to be seen whether history shall have to rank him among its favorites, or high in the list of those unfortunates against whom it has recorded sentence of everlasting condemnation.  Should he live, and maintain his place, and bequeath his throne to his son, and that son be of an age to appreciate his position, and possessed of fair talent, he may pass for the modern Augustus; but thinking of him, and of the strange reverses of fortune that have happened since 1789 to men and to nations, we subscribe to the wisdom of the hackneyed Greek sentiment, that no man should be called fortunate until the seal of death shall have placed an everlasting and an impassable barrier between him and the cruel sports of Mutabilities which are played “to many men’s decay.”

In one respect it will be allowed by all but absolutists that the condition of Europe has changed greatly for the better in the last eleven years, as a consequence of the triumphs of the French Emperor.  From the year 1815 to 1850, national independence was in its true sense unknown to Continental Europe.  The ascendency of Napoleon I. had small claim to faultlessness, but the men who led in the work of his overthrow proceeded as if they meant to make the world regret his fall.  This is the secret—­which secret is none—­of the reaction that speedily took place in his favor, and which caused an alliance of Liberals and Jacobins