When Louis shall join me his spirit and mine will still animate the Bonapartes who shall come after us.

Repose entire confidence in his discretion.  Napoleon the Third lives only for France.

You cry for liberty of speech and liberty of the press.  But liberty is anarchy.  Would you demand liberty for the army?  Without a head to guide and control it, the army of France would be a scourge.

Through calamity the most depressing, the hand of destiny has led Louis Napoleon to the throne of France, and against sickness and disease, against the hand of the assassin, and against vilifications of his enemies, it will hold him there, firm.  His time has not yet come.  Before he bids adieu to life he will secure an able leader for France.

I give him my hand.  I embrace him in spirit.  The shadow of Napoleon attends him by day and by night.

Adieu,
NAPOLEON.

W. M. THACKERAY.

HIS POST MORTEM EXPERIENCE.

Poor Will Thackeray, when a stripling, was fit to kneel in the street before his mistress, that bright luminary who shone to his boyish eyes like a star of the first magnitude!  Alas, he discovered her to be one of the sixteenth, and by the time he had ceased to care for polished boots and stiff, broad collars, she had dwindled down to an ordinary piece of humanity!

He found his boon companions, like himself, liable to mistake an ant for a whale and think the King of England next in royalty to a god!

What a fool he made of himself in the eyes of those who were wiser than he, when he swore the crown of England was made of unalloyed gold!  The water he drank was filled with animalculae, yet he swore it was pure as the gods’ nectar.  The best and freshest air he breathed contained poison, yet his boyish wisdom knew better than that.

Poor Thackeray! wiser men than he knew that youthful imagination was a cheat; that the mistress of his heart was not a goddess; and wiser beings than they all knew—­angelic beings, living in the golden streets of Paradise, knew—­that the conception of what the spirit after death would be able to do was as far from the truth as were his boyish dreams of the mistress of his heart!

Poor Thackeray! he has attained that superior wisdom now!  He walks, himself a ghost, among the ghosts of the past; and these “airy nothings” nod and smile, and shake hands, and say: 

“Yes, we are ourselves.”

He thrusts his hands into his trowsers pockets, and remembers the time when he thought it would be indecent to go naked in the New Jerusalem!  Trowsers, forsooth!  Yes, here they are, pockets and all; and he dives his hands in deeper, jingling something which strongly resembles cash; and struts about and hobnobs with Addison, Spencer, Sterne, old Dean Swift, and he asks himself, “are these the great men of my fancy?” On reflection he finds he had expected to meet these luminaries shining like actual stars in the firmament, attended by some undefined splendor.