seems to speak that he is born to command.  “We went into his apartment to expostulate warmly with him, and not to depart until our complaints were removed.  But by his manner of receiving us we were disarmed in a moment, and could not utter one word of what we were going to say.  He talked to us with an eloquence peculiarly his own, and explained with clearness and precision the importance of pursuing the line of conduct he had adopted, never contradicting us in direct terms, but controverted our opinions so astutely that we had not a single word to offer in reply, and retired convinced that he was in the right and that we were manifestly in the wrong.”  It is a common delusion with little men to believe that they are big with wisdom and knowledge, even after they have been ravelled to shreds by a man of real ability.  The French Republican officers were condescendingly candid in giving the First Consul a high character, and he, in turn, made these self-assertive gentlemen feel abashed in his presence, and sent them about their business without having made any unnatural effort to prove that they had had an interview with a majestic personality, who had made articulation impossible to them.  I might give thousands of testimonies, showing the great power this superman had over other minds, from the highest monarchical potentate to the humblest of his subjects.  The former were big with a combination of fear and envy.  They would deign to grovel at his feet, slaver compliments, and deluge him with adulation (if he would have allowed them), and then proceed to stab him from behind in the most cowardly fashion.  There are always swarms of human insects whose habits of life range between the humble supplicant and the stinging, poisonous wasps.

It would have been better for the whole civilized world had there been more wisely clever men, such as Charles James Fox, in public life in this and other countries during Napoleon’s time.  He was the one great Englishman who towered above any of the ministers who were contemporary with him in this country, and certainly no public man had a finer instinct than he as to the policy Great Britain should observe towards a nation that was being dragged out of the cesspool of corruption and violence into a democratic grandeur of government that was the envy of Continental as well as British antiquarians.  Fox saw clearly the manifest benefit to both countries if they could be made to understand and not to envy each other.  In 1802, Fox was received in Paris like a highly popular monarch.  The whole city went wild with the joy of having him as the guest of France.  He was the great attraction at the theatres next to the First Consul, whom Fox declared “was a most decided character, that would hold to his purpose with more constancy and through a longer interval than is imagined; his views are not directed to this, i.e. the United Kingdom, but to the Continent only.”  “I never saw,” he says, “so little