of Napoleon is quite as appreciative as that of Mueller, and coming from him to the great conqueror of his native land makes it an invaluable piece of impartial history which reverses the loose and vindictive libels that were insidiously circulated by a gang of paid scoundrels in order to prejudice public opinion against him.  Wieland, among other eulogies of him, says:  “I have never beheld any one more calm, more simple, more mild or less ostentatious in appearance; nothing about him indicated the feeling of power in a great monarch.”  He conversed with him for an hour and a half, “to the great surprise of the whole assembly.”

Here we have a brief but very high testimony from two men of literary distinction, who had formed their impressions by personal contact.  The present writer’s belief is that had members of the British Government been guided by reason and sound judgment instead of blind, wicked prejudice; had they accepted overtures made to them from time to time by the head of the French nation during his rule, we should not have been engaged during the last five years in a world-war watering the earth with the blood of our race with reckless extravagance.  The great soldier-statesman foretold what would happen.  What irony that we should be in deadly conflict with the Power which, as an ally, helped to destroy him and is now engaged in frantic efforts to destroy us!  Had Pitt and those who acted with him been endowed with human wisdom, he would not have written the following lines, but would have held out the olive-branch of peace and goodwill to men on earth:—­

I see (says Pitt in a scrap of MS. found amongst his papers) various and opposite qualities—­all the great and all the little passions unfavourable to public tranquillity united in the breast of one man, and of that man, unhappily, whose personal caprice can scarce fluctuate for an hour without affecting the destiny of Europe.  I see the inward workings of fear struggling with pride in an ardent, enterprising, and tumultuous mind.  I see all the captious jealousy of conscious usurpation, dreaded, detested, and obeyed, the giddiness and intoxication of splendid but unmerited success, the arrogance, the presumption, the selfwill of unlimited and idolized power, and more dreadful than all in the plenitude of authority, the restless and incessant activity of guilt, but unsated ambition.

This scrap of mere phrases indicates a mind that was far beneath the calibre of that of a real statesman.  It was a terrible fate for Great Britain to have at the head of the Government a man whose public life was a perpetual danger to the state.  Had Pitt been the genius his eloquence led his contemporaries to believe he was, he would have availed himself of the opportunities the Great Figure, who was making the world rock with his genius, afforded the British Government from time to time of making peace on equitable terms.  But Pitt’s vision of the large things