was that of a Roman, or perhaps an Indian warrior, and I could fancy him concluding appropriately his speech in the words of the Mexican king, ‘And I too; am I on a bed of roses?’”

What a load of moral responsibility upon one man!  But his mind was insensible to moral responsibility.  Surely if it had not been it must have been crushed beneath it.  Now, if you want to understand the character of Napoleon—­but surely I must take a fresh start before I launch on so portentous a subject as that.

But before I leave the military men let me, for the credit of my own country, after that infamous incident of the letters, indicate these six well-thumbed volumes of “Napier’s History.”  This is the story of the great Peninsular War, by one who fought through it himself, and in no history has a more chivalrous and manly account been given of one’s enemy.  Indeed, Napier seems to me to push it too far, for his admiration appears to extend not only to the gallant soldiers who opposed him, but to the character and to the ultimate aims of their leader.  He was, in fact, a political follower of Charles James Fox, and his heart seems to have been with the enemy even at the moment when he led his men most desperately against them.  In the verdict of history the action of those men who, in their honest zeal for freedom, inflamed somewhat by political strife, turned against their own country, when it was in truth the Champion of Freedom, and approved of a military despot of the most uncompromising kind, seems wildly foolish.

But if Napier’s politics may seem strange, his soldiering was splendid, and his prose among the very best that I know.  There are passages in that work—­the one which describes the breach of Badajos, that of the charge of the Fusiliers at Albuera, and that of the French advance at Fuentes d’Onoro—­which once read haunt the mind for ever.  The book is a worthy monument of a great national epic.  Alas! for the pregnant sentence with which it closes, “So ended the great war, and with it all memory of the services of the veterans.”  Was there ever a British war of which the same might not have been written?

The quotation which I have given from Mercer’s book turns my thoughts in the direction of the British military reminiscences of that period, less numerous, less varied, and less central than the French, but full of character and interest all the same.  I have found that if I am turned loose in a large library, after hesitating over covers for half an hour or so, it is usually a book of soldier memoirs which I take down.  Man is never so interesting as when he is thoroughly in earnest, and no one is so earnest as he whose life is at stake upon the event.  But of all types of soldier the best is the man who is keen upon his work, and yet has general culture which enables him to see that work in its due perspective, and to sympathize with the gentler aspirations of mankind.  Such a man is Mercer, an ice-cool fighter,