death in 1821.  The vanity of Napoleon appears to have been wounded from the beginning by this appointment.  According to him, no person ought in decency to have been entrusted with the permanent care of his detention, but some English nobleman of the highest rank.  The answer is very plain, that the situation was not likely to find favour in the eyes of any such person; and when one considers what the birth and manners of by far the greater number of Buonaparte’s own courtiers, peers and princes included, were, it is difficult to repress wonder in listening to this particular subject of complaint.  Passing over this original quarrel—­it appears that, according to Buonaparte’s own admission, Sir H. Lowe endeavoured, when he took his thankless office upon him, to place the intercourse between himself and his prisoner on a footing as gracious as could well be looked for under all the circumstances of the case; and that he, the ex-emperor, ere the governor had been a week at St. Helena, condescended to insult him to his face by language so extravagantly, intolerably, and vulgarly offensive, as never ought, under any circumstances whatever, to have stained the lips of one who made any pretension to the character of a gentleman.  Granting that Sir Hudson Lowe was not an officer of the first distinction—­it must be admitted that he did no wrong in accepting a duty offered to him by his government; and that Napoleon was guilty, not only of indecorum, but of meanness, in reproaching a man so situated, as he did almost at their first interview, with the circumstances—­of which at worst it could but be said that they were not splendid—­of his previous life.  But this is far too little.  Granting that Sir Hudson Lowe had been in history and in conduct, both before he came to St. Helena and during his stay there, all that the most ferocious libels of the Buonapartists have ever dared to say or to insinuate—­it would still remain a theme of unmixed wonder and regret, that Napoleon Buonaparte should have stooped to visit on his head the wrongs which, if they were wrongs, proceeded not from the governor of St. Helena, but from the English ministry, whose servant he was.  “I can only account,” says Mr. Ellis, “for his petulance and unfounded complaints from one of two motives—­either he wishes by these means to keep alive an interest in Europe, and more especially in England, where he flatters himself he has a party; or his troubled mind finds an occupation in the tracasseries which his present conduct gives to the governor.  If the latter be the case, it is in vain for any governor to unite being on good terms with him to the performance of his duty.”