In the evening L. took me into a corner, and we had a long conversation.

He had been reading my ‘Athens Journal.’

‘What struck me,’ he said, ’in every page of it, was the resemblance of King Otho to Louis Napoleon.’

‘I see the resemblance,’ I answered, ’but it is the resemblance of a dwarf to a giant.’

‘No,’ he replied.  ’Of a man five feet seven inches high to one five feet eleven inches.  There are not more than four inches between them.  There is the same cunning, the same coldness, the same vindictiveness, the same silence, the same perseverance, the same unscrupulousness, the same selfishness, the same anxiety to appear to do everything that is done, and above all, the same determination to destroy, or to seduce by corruption or by violence, every man and every institution favourable to liberty, independence, or self-government.  In one respect Otho had the more difficult task.  He found himself, in 1843, subject to a Constitution carefully framed under the advice of England for the express purpose of controlling him.  He did not attempt to get rid of it by a coup d’etat, or even to alter it, but cunningly and skilfully perverted it into an instrument of despotism.  Louis Napoleon destroyed the Constitution which he found, and made a new one, copied from that which had been gradually elaborated by his uncle, which as a restraint is intentionally powerless and fraudulent.

‘A man,’ he continued, ’may acquire influence either by possessing in a higher degree the qualities which belong to his country and to his time, or by possessing those in which they are deficient.

’Wellington is an example of this first sort.  His excellences were those of an Englishman carried almost to perfection.

’Louis Napoleon belongs to the second.  If his merits had been impetuous courage, rapidity of ideas, quickness of decision, frankness, versatility and resource, he would have been surrounded by his equals or his superiors.  He predominated over those with whom he came in contact because he differed from them.  Because he was calm, slow, reserved, silent, and persevering.  Because he is a Dutchman, not a Frenchman.’

‘He seems,’ I said, ‘to have lost his calmness.’

‘Yes,’ answered L.  ’But under what a shock!  And observe that though the greatest risk was encountered by him, the terror was greatest among his entourage.  I do not believe that if he had been left to himself he would have lost his prudence or his self-possession.  He did not for the first day.  Passions are contagious.  Everyone who approached him was agitated by terror and anger.  His intrepidity and self-reliance, great as they are, were disturbed by the hubbub all round him.  His great defects are three.  First, his habit of self-contemplation.  He belongs to the men whom the Germans call subjective, whose eye is always turned inwardly; who think only of themselves, of their own character, and of their own fortunes.