the minister of war. There was but one Frenchman he cared to see, and one portion of France. PARIS, as the great city looked so soon after the storm of the Revolution, with her Louvre filled by the spoils of Italy; and BONAPARTE, now consul for life; when these had been seen, he should at once return.

The precise time of his arrival was that to which Wordsworth's well-known sonnet has referred:

This is young Bonaparte's natal day,

And his is henceforth an establisht sway,
Consul for Life.'

Upon the occasion when Bonaparte first publicly assumed the rank with which he had been thus invested, Landor saw him. Advantage had been taken of it for a great holiday, of which, as the young Englishman walked the streets, he saw everywhere the mighty preparation. Yet, in the signs of enthusiasm presented outwardly, there were indications leading strongly to a suspicion that the enthusiasm had been specially got up for Paris; and the suspicion became a certainty when the hero of the day made his appearance.

It was in the garden of the Tuileries; and in a letter to his brother Henry, now lying before me, Landor described the scene. At various points there had been built up pyramids of wood, each of the height of five-and-twenty feet, covered with lamps of extraordinary brilliancy. In the same manner were ornamented 'the sides of several pieces of water in which were fountains playing; and there was not a statue nor an orange-tree of which 'you could not distinguish the minutest part. Seven rows of benches were erected over the grand flight of steps which leads ' into the palace; immediately above, at the height perhaps of thirty feet, sat the principal officers of state; and on the leads. which cover the colonnade were the military guards. Bona* parte made his appearance in the centre, where his wife had 'sat some time in company with the other two consuls. I ex'pected that the sky would have been rent with acclamations. On the contrary, he experienced such a reception as was given to Richard the Third. He was sensibly mortified. All bowed, —but he waved to and fro, and often wiped his face with, his handkerchief. He retired in about ten minutes.'

Landor's own mortification could hardly have been less than Bonaparte's. Not thus had he expected to see the man by whose astonishing career, up to this turning hour of it, all the world had been enthralled: the hero of Italy, by whom conflicting creeds were to be reconciled; the armed leader of the French Revolution, by whom decaying nations were to be regenerated. Was it possible that he in whom such hopes had centred could now consent to become but another life-tenant of the Tuileries, changing the substance for the shadows of greatness? In the same year and month when these letters were written by Landor, that question was sorrowfully put and answered by Wordsworth:

6

'I grieved for Bonaparté with a vain

And an unthinking grief! for who aspires
To genuine greatness but from just desires,
And knowledge such as he could never gain?'

Bluntly and characteristically, but to similar effect, Landor wrote off to his brother under the immediate influence of what Paris itself had shown him; and it is worthy of note that amid his many changes of opinion, the opinion now formed of Napoleon, and of the people under his rule, was never afterwards materially changed. His point of view was not that of Wordsworth, and his wishes and aims were different; but he had arrived substantially at the same result. 'Doubtless the govern'ment of Bonaparte,' he wrote, 'is the best that can be contrived 'for Frenchmen. Monkeys must be chained, though it may cost them some grimaces. If you have read attentively the 'last senatus-consultum, you will find that not an atom of liberty is left. This people, the most inconstant and therefore 'the most contemptible in the world, seemed to have recovered 'their senses when they had lost their freedom. The idol is beyond their reach, but the idolatry has vanished. A consul of so great a genius will make the nation formidable to all the 'earth but England; but I hope there is no danger of any one 'imitating its example. As to the cause of liberty, this cursed 'nation has ruined it forever.' What he thus said in his twentyseventh year he was saying in his eighty-seventh, nearly in the same words; the intervening sixty years having failed to amend or remove the impression thus received in his youth.

To his sister Elizabeth he described the second occasion when he saw Napoleon. It was at a review in the court of the Tuileries, when he stood within six or eight yards of him for a quarter of an hour. His countenance,' he wrote, 'is not of that fierce 'cast which you see in the prints, and which perhaps it may 'assume in battle. He seems melancholy and reserved, but not 'morose or proud. His figure and complexion are nearly like 'those of Charles Norris. He rode a little white horse, about 'the size of my father's; and cantered up and down six or eight lines of military, drawn out in the court of the Tuileries, which 'is about the size of Lincoln's-inn-fields. Each line lowered its 'colours as he passed, and he took off his hat in return. The 'French are not mightily civil, and one cannot much wonder,— 'but I got an admirable place by a piece of well-timed flattery. 'After I had seen Bonaparte canter by me at the distance of ' about a dozen yards, I left my situation at the window and 'went down close to the gate of the palace. Presently came 'the chief consul and half a score generals. The people made 'room through fear of the horses, which indeed were fierce 'enough, being covered with blue and red velvet, one half of ' which was hid with gold-lace. Instead of going with the crowd, I pushed forward and got by the side of Bonaparte's Mamelouk, in a place where there were none but soldiers. There 'was a very tall fellow just before me. I begged him to let me 'see Bonaparte, and observed that probably he had seen him ' often and shared his victories. The youth was delighted. Ah! 'le voilà, monsieur! said he and in a moment there was nothing between me and this terror of Europe but the backs of two horses, over which I could see him as distinctly as I see 'this paper.'

6

It is doubtful if he saw him again, though he always believed it was the fugitive from Waterloo whom he met at Tours thirteen years later, when the allied armies were in Paris: but he remembered to the close of his life that first sight of Napoleon; and his description only the year before his death, in conversation with an American lady in Florence, is not contradicted by his letter written more than sixty years before. I was in Paris,' said Landor one day, at the time that Bonaparte made his

'entrance as first consul. I was standing within a few feet of 'him when he passed, and had a capital good look at him. He 'was exceedingly handsome then, with a rich olive complexion and oval face, youthful as a girl's. Near him rode Murat, 'mounted upon a gold-clad charger; and very handsome he was 'too, but coxcombical.'*

On his way back he wrote to his sister of the carriage-horses and cart-horses of the country, and a few lines from this letter are worth preserving.

'First I will tell you of those that are used in carriages. Their sides are so flat that a whole horse looks like half a one, and their harness is nothing but a hundred pieces of rope: such harness is easily repaired. On the contrary, the cart-horses are decorated most magnificently. There is a high piece of wood above the collar, on which is suspended a sheepskin dyed red or blue. The rest of the body is covered with a net, the meshes of which are so large that it serves no purpose but ornament. There is not a horse in France that would not give all he is worth to be rid of these sheepskins, at least in summer; bit there is no redress.'

His feeling on finding himself in England again was upon the whole a healthier one than that with which he quitted it. The splendours of the Republic had paled. Too many close resemblances had presented themselves between the French carthorse and the French citizen. The meshes woven by the conquests of Napoleon were no doubt highly ornamental, but otherwise not of much benefit; and the red sheepskin of military glory was not worth the galling pressure of its accompanying high 'piece of wood above the collar.' One of Landor's first acts at his return was to assist in the publication of a new edition of his Gebir, produced at Oxford under his brother's direction; and the line which had characterised Bonaparte as 'a mortal man above 'all mortal praise,' appeared with a note of very large qualification. Bonaparte might have been so,' he now said, and in the 'beginning of his career it was augured that he would be. But 'unhappily he thinks that to produce great changes is to perform 'great actions. To annihilate ancient freedom and substitute 'new; to give republics a monarchical government, and the pro

Atlantic Monthly for April 1866. 'I looked with wonder upon a person,' says the lady who describes these last days of Landor, who re'membered Napoleon Bonaparte as a slender young man, and listened with delight to a voice from so dim a past.'

'vinces of monarchy a republican one; in short, to overthrow by 'violence all the institutions, and to tear from the heart all the 'social habits of man, has been the tenor of his politics to the 'present hour.' Nor did he hesitate in another note to declare, while confessing the hopes he had indulged of an empire of justice and equality, that in such hopes raised from the French Revolution every good man had been disappointed. 'God forbid,' he exclaimed, that we should ever be impelled to use their means ' of amelioration, or that our arms should be attended by success like theirs-internal and external subjugation.'

VI. AGAIN WRITING POETRY.

Other literary work he also at this time took in hand. In the lecture-rooms at Oxford he had made acquaintance with the story of the Phocæans, the invaders of Gaul who built Marseilles; and he now selected it for the subject of an epic. Of the exact time when he took up or laid aside his plan, I cannot speak with certainty; but before his execution of that part which he published there had come the interval and influence of Gebir, and it was in some respects more adverse than favourable, for as yet even the ten admirers he challenged had not come to him. There is a touching admission to this effect in one of his letters to Southey in 1809. I confess to you, if even foolish men had read Gebir, 'I should have continued to write poetry. There is something of summer in the hum of insects.' After such experience, he had less care to renew the effort in any finished or elaborate form. He rushed at once into print with what he had written; sent it out uncorrected in another sixpenny pamphlet; and, pleading the example of the painter who asked people only to tell him his faults, protested that he wished to ascertain not merely whether his poetry was good, but whether it was wanted.

The answer now may be given succinctly that it was good and was not wanted; falling dead-born, yet containing what the world should not have let perish so indifferently. As a whole, undoubtedly the poem is too like its own Sardian vase of burnished gold,

'Dazzling without, but dark from depth within,'