I felt that the man’s hand trembled and, fearing lest he might imagine, in his excitement, that I really was the Duke of Wellington, I endeavored to allay his violence, and, in an underhand manner to soothe him, I called up his national pride; I represented to him that the Duke of Wellington had advanced the glory of the English, that he had always been an innocent tool in the hands of others, that he was fond of beefsteak, and that he finally—­but the Lord only knows what fine things I said of Wellington as I felt that razor tickling around my throat!

What vexes me most is the reflection that Wellington will be as immortal as Napoleon Bonaparte.  It is true that, in like manner, the name of Pontius Pilate will be as little likely to be forgotten as that of Christ.  Wellington and Napoleon!  It is a wonderful phenomenon that the human mind can at the same time think of both these names.  There can be no greater contrast than the two, even in their external appearance.  Wellington, the dumb ghost, with an ashy-gray soul in a buckram body, a wooden smile on his freezing face—­and, by the side of that, think of the figure of Napoleon, every inch a god!

That figure never disappears from my memory.  I still see him, high on his steed, with eternal eyes in his marble-like, imperial face, glancing calm as destiny on the Guards defiling past—­he was then sending them to Russia, and the old Grenadiers glanced up at him so terribly devoted, so all-consciously serious, so proud in death—­

“Te, Caesar, morituri, salutant.”

There often steals over me a secret doubt whether I ever really saw him, if we were ever contemporaries, and then it seems to me as if his portrait, torn from the little frame of the present, vanished away more proudly and imperiously in the twilight of the past.  His name even now sounds to us like a word of the early world, and as antique and as heroic as those of Alexander and Caesar.  It has already become a rallying word among races, and when the East and the West meet they fraternize on that single name.

I once felt, in the deepest manner, how significantly and magically that name can sound.  It was in the harbor of London, at the India Docks, and on board an East India-man just arrived from Bengal.  It was a giant-like ship, fully manned with Hindoos.  The grotesque forms and groups, the singularly variegated dresses, the enigmatical expressions of countenance, the strange gestures, the wild and foreign ring of their language, their shouts of joy and their laughter, with the seriousness ever rising and falling on certain soft yellow faces, their eyes like black flowers which looked at me as with wondrous woe—­all of this awoke in me a feeling like that of enchantment; I was suddenly as if transported into Scherezade’s story, and I thought that broad-leaved palms, and long-necked camels, and gold-covered elephants, and other fabulous trees and animals must forthwith appear.  The supercargo who was on the vessel, and who understood as little of the language as I myself, could not, in his truly English narrow-mindedness, narrate to me enough of what a ridiculous race they were, nearly all pure Mohammedans collected from every land of Asia, from the limits of China to the Arabian Sea, there being even some jet-black, woolly-haired Africans among them.