are the reports of the different authorities, I have already remarked:  but consider, by itself, the story told by any one of them; it carries an air of fiction and romance on the very face of it.  All the events are great, and splendid, and marvellous;[11] great armies,—­great victories,—­great frosts,—­great reverses,—­“hair-breadth ’scapes,”—­empires subverted in a few days; everything happened in defiance of political calculations, and in opposition to the experience of past times; everything upon that grand scale, so common in Epic Poetry, so rare in real life; and thus calculated to strike the imagination of the vulgar, and to remind the sober-thinking few of the Arabian Nights.  Every event, too, has that roundness and completeness which is so characteristic of fiction; nothing is done by halves; we have complete victories,—­total overthrows, entire subversion of empires,—­perfect re-establishments of them,—­crowded upon us in rapid succession.  To enumerate the improbabilities of each of the several parts of this history, would fill volumes; but they are so fresh in every one’s memory, that there is no need of such a detail:  let any judicious man, not ignorant of history and of human nature, revolve them in his mind, and consider how far they are conformable to Experience,[12] our best and only sure guide.  In vain will he seek in history for something similar to this wonderful Buonaparte; “nought but himself can be his parallel.”

Will the conquests of Alexander be compared with his? They were effected over a rabble of effeminate, undisciplined barbarians; else his progress would hardly have been so rapid:  witness his father Philip, who was much longer occupied in subduing the comparatively insignificant territory of the warlike and civilized Greeks, notwithstanding their being divided into numerous petty States, whose mutual jealousy enabled him to contend with them separately.  But the Greeks had never made such progress in arts and arms as the great and powerful States of Europe, which Buonaparte is represented as so speedily overpowering.  His empire has been compared to the Roman:  mark the contrast; he gains in a few years, that dominion, or at least control, over Germany, wealthy, civilized, and powerful, which the Romans in the plenitude of their power, could not obtain, during a struggle of as many centuries, against the ignorant half-savages who then possessed it; of whom Tacitus remarks, that, up to his own time they had been “triumphed over rather than conquered.”

Another peculiar circumstance in the history of this extraordinary personage is, that when it Is found convenient to represent him as defeated, though he is by no means defeated by halves, but involved in much more sudden and total ruin than the personages of real history usually meet with; yet, if it is thought fit he should be restored, it is done as quickly and completely as if Merlin’s rod had been employed.