The whole continent trembled at beholding the audacity of his designs, and the miracle of their execution.  Skepticism bowed to the prodigies of his performance; romance assumed the air of history; nor was there aught too incredible for belief, or too fanciful for expectation, when the world saw a subaltern of Corsica waving his imperial flag over her most ancient capitals.  All the visions of antiquity became commonplace in his contemplation:  kings were his people; nations were his outposts; and he disposed of courts, and crowns, and camps, and churches, and cabinets, as if they were the titular dignitaries of the chessboard!  Amid all these changes, he stood immutable as adamant.  It mattered little whether in the field, or in the drawing-room; with the mob, or the levee; wearing the Jacobin bonnet, or the iron crown; banishing a Braganza, or espousing a Hapsburg; dictating peace on a raft to the Czar of Russia, or contemplating defeat at the gallows of Leipsic he was still the same military despot.

In this wonderful combination, his affectations of literature must not be omitted.  The jailer of the press, he affected the patronage of letters; the proscriber of books, he encouraged philosophy; the persecutor of authors, and the murderer of printers, he yet pretended to the protection of learning; the assassin of Palm, the silencer of De Stael, and the denouncer of Kotzebue, he was the friend of David, the benefactor of De Lille, and sent his academic prize to the philosopher of England.

Such a medley of contradictions, and, at the same time, such an individual consistency, were never united in the same character.  A royalist, a republican, and an emperor; a Mohammedan, a Catholic, and a patron of the synagogue; a subaltern and a sovereign; a traitor and a tyrant; a Christian and an infidel; he was, through all his vicissitudes, the same stern, impatient, inflexible original; the same mysterious, incomprehensible self; the man without a model, and without a shadow.

Notes.—­St. Louis (b. 1215, d. 1270), a wise and pious king of France, known as Louis ix.  Napoleon was appointed to the Military School at Brienne, by Louis xvi.  Brutus, Lucius Junius, abolished the royal office at Rome (509 B. C.), and ruled as consul for two years.

Jacobin Bonnet.—­The Jacobins were a powerful political club during the first French Revolution.  A peculiar bonnet or hat was their badge.  Braganza, the name of the royal family of Portugal.  Maria of Portugal, and her father, Charles iv. of Spain, were both expelled by Napoleon.  Hapsburg, the name of the royal family of Austria.  Napoleon’s second wife was Maria Louisa, the daughter of the Emperor.  Czar.—­The treaty of Tilsit was agreed to between Bonaparte and the Czar Alexander on the river Memel.  Leipsic.—­Napoleon was defeated by the allied forces, in October, 1813, at this city.

Palm, a German publisher, shot, in 1806, by order of Napoleon, for publishing a pamphlet against him.  De Stael (pro.  De Stal), a celebrated French authoress, banished from Paris, in 1802, by Napoleon.  Kotzebue, an eminent German dramatist.  David, the leading historical painter of his times in France.  De Lille, an eminent French poet and professor.