But if they expected to commence operations by subjecting their pupils to their own legitimate standard, and to bring about a tame acquiescence in the existing order of things, they were wofully mistaken.  Conservatism never struggled with a more determined set of radicals.  Their life and action were treason.  They talked it, and wrote it, and sang it.  There was no form in which they could express it that they left untouched.  They covered the walls with grotesque representations of the royal family; they shouted out parodies of Bourbon songs; and there was not a hero of the old regime, from Hugh Capet down, whose virtues were not celebrated under the name of Napoleon.  It was in vain that orders were issued not to mention him.  They might as well have told the young rebels not to breathe.  “Not mention him!  They would like to see who could stop them!” And they yelled out his name in utter defiance of regulation and discipline.

Wonder was occasionally expressed, whether the time would come which would restore him to France.  And now “the time had come, and the man.”

While the assembled sovereigns were parcelling out the farm of Europe, in lots to suit purchasers, its late master decided to claim a few acres for his own use, and, as he set foot on his old domain, he is said to have exclaimed,—­“The Congress of Vienna is dissolved!”

It was a beautiful afternoon of early spring, when a class returned from the Lyceum with news almost too great for utterance.  One had in his hand a coarse, dingy piece of paper, which he waved above his head, and the others followed him with looks portending tidings of no ordinary character.  That paper was the address of Napoleon to the army, on landing from Elba.  It was rudely done, the materials were of the most common description, the print was scarcely legible,—­but it was headed with the imperial eagle, and it contained words which none of his old soldiers could withstand.  How it reached Paris, simultaneously with the intelligence of his landing, is beyond my comprehension; but copies of it were rapidly circulated, and all the inhabitants of Paris knew its contents before they slept that night.

I know of no writer who has so thoroughly understood the wonderful eloquence of Napoleon as Lord Brougham.  He has pronounced the address to the Old Guard, at Fontainebleau, “a masterpiece of dignified and pathetic composition”; and the speech at the Champ de Mars, he says, “is to be placed amongst the most perfect pieces of simple and majestic eloquence.”  Napoleon certainly knew well the people with whom he had to deal, and his concise, nervous, comprehensive sentences told upon French feeling like shocks of a galvanic battery.  What would have been absurd, if addressed to the soldiers of any other nation, was exactly the thing to fire his own with irresistible energy.  At the battle of the Pyramids he said to them, “Forty centuries look upon your deeds,” and they understood him.  He pointed to “the