The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal vigor of the conqueror’s mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon’s moral nature, and the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the unmanning effects of his despotism.  The words used to describe the moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset.  In the paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the “rare good sense” of Napoleon, of “his instinct of justice.”  But was it not a compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of justice, backed by a Titan’s will, wielding a mighty intellect, that enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot and the merciless devastator?  Again, can it be said of Napoleon that he possessed good sense in a rare degree?  Good sense is an instinctive insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility.  The moral side is at least the half of it:  Napoleon’s moral endowment was but fractional.  Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical, or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must be felt.  In whatever reaches general human interests, whether as practical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for their prosperity, a primary ingredient.  “The Tempest” and “Don Quixote” shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots draw their first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum.  And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is the foundation of his eminent critical ability.  He has been led, we conceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by the blinding splendor of Napoleon’s military genius, through which, with such swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on the purely material plane.

When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about the life and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined the proposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to write such a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, “their moral is not your moral.”  Such international misinterpretations and exaggerations are instinctive and involuntary.  A nation from its being a nation, has a certain one-sidedness.  To the Italian (even to one who carries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheer brutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the cavaliere servente is looked upon with reprobation tempered by scorn.  To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimation