[Footnote 1:  Blackwood’s Magazine.]

It seems, too, as if the world forgets now—­what assuredly must be remembered hereafter in history—­that it was he who relieved Europe from the treaties of Vienna, and asserted the claims of nationalities; that he brought about the resurrection of Italy; that through his policy we have a solution satisfactory to the world in general of the question of the pope’s power as a temporal prince in Italy; that he was the builder of modern Paris, the promoter of agriculture, the railroad king of France, the peasant’s and the workman’s friend.

In early life he had been an adventurer; but a kind heart gave him gracious manners.  He was grateful, faithful, and generous; terribly prodigal of money, and the victim of the needy men by whom he was surrounded.  It seems as if, in spite of his coup d’etat (which, subtracting its massacres, may have been a measure of self-preservation), he deserves better of the world and of France than to have his memory spurned and spat upon, as men do now.

He gave France eighteen years of pre-eminent prosperity; he left her, to be sure, in ruins.  In his fall he utterly obliterated the prestige of the name of Bonaparte.  No Bonaparte, probably, will ever again awaken the enthusiasm of the French people,—­an enthusiasm which Napoleon III. relied on, justly at first, and fatally afterwards, when a generation had arisen in France, from whom the feeling had passed away.

The emperor’s malady, which was slowly sapping his strength, is said to be the most painful one that flesh is heir to.  Every movement was pain to him.  Absolute rest was what he needed, but cares pressed hard upon him on every side.  He must die, and leave his empire in the hands of a woman and a child.  His government had been wholly personal.  He could not transmit his power, such is it was, to any other person,—­least of all could he place it in feeble hands.  There were no props to his throne.  No Bismarck or Cavour stood beside him, to whom he might confide his wife and son, and feel that though his hand no longer held the helm, the ship would sail straight on the course he had laid down for her.  The men about him were third and fourth rate men,—­all of them enormously his own inferiors.  They cheated and deceived and plundered him; and he knew it in a measure, though not as he knew it after his downfall.

The emperor said once:  “There is but one Bonapartist among us, and that is Fleury.  The empress is a Legitimist, I am a Socialist, and Prince Napoleon a Republican.”  As he contemplated the future, it seems to have occurred to him that the only thing that could be done was to teach France to govern herself,—­to change his despotic authority into a constitutional government.  He might live long enough, he thought, to make the new plan work, and if, by a successful war with Germany, a war impending and perhaps inevitable, he could gain brilliant military glory; if he could restore to France that frontier of the Rhine which had been wrested from her by Europe after the downfall of his uncle,—­his dynasty would be covered with glory, and all might go on right for a few years, till his boy should be old enough to replace him.