Lowe seems to have had an inherent notion that the position in which he was placed entitled him to pursue a policy of unrelenting severity, and that homage should be paid as his reward.  He thirsted for respect to be shown himself, and was amazed at the inordinate ingratitude of the French in not recognising his amiable qualities.  It was his habit to remind them that but for his clemency in carrying out the instructions of Bathurst and those who acted with him, their condition could be made unendurable.  He was incapable of grasping the lofty personality of the persecuted guest of England.

The popular, though erroneous, idea that Napoleon was, and ever had been, a beast of prey, fascinated him; his days were occupied in planning out schemes of closer supervision, and his nights were haunted with the vision of his charge smashing down every barrier he had racked his intellect to construct, and then vanishing from the benevolent custody of his saintly Government to again wage sanguinary war and spill rivers of blood.  The awful presentiment of escape and the consequences of it were ever lacerating his uneasy spirit, and thus he never allowed himself to be forgotten; restrictions impishly vexatious were ordered with monotonous regularity.  Napoleon aptly described Lowe as “being afflicted with an inveterate itch.”

Montholon, in vol. i. p. 184, relates how Lowe would often leap out of bed in the middle of the night, after dreaming of the Emperor’s flight, mount his horse and ride, like a man demented, to Longwood, only to be assured by the officer on duty that all was well and that the smitten hero was still his prisoner.  When Napoleon was told of these nocturnal visitations, he was overcome with mirth, but at the same time filled with contempt, not alone for this amazing specimen, but for the creatures who had created him a dignitary.

The tragic farce of sending the Emperor to the poisonous plateau of Longwood, and giving Lowe Plantation House with its much more healthy climate to reside at, is a phenomenon which few people who have made themselves conversant with all the facts and circumstances will be able to understand.  But the policy of this Government, of whom the Scottish bard sings so rapturously, is a problem that can never be solved.

To a wise body of men, and in view of the fact that the eyes of the world were fixed upon them and on the vanquished man, their prisoner, the primary thought would have been compassion, even to indulgence; instead of which they and their agents behaved as though they were devoid of humane feelings.

Lowe’s ambition seems to have been to ignore propriety, and to force his way to the Emperor’s privacy in order that he might assure himself that his charge had not escaped, but his ambition and his heroics were calmly and contemptuously ignored.  “Tell my gaoler,” said Napoleon to his valet Noverras, “that it is in his power to change his keys for the hatchet of the executioner, and that