guerre, il n'entrait aucune des qualités propres à la conservation."
Considering the end, the sub-chapter headed "Was he Invincible?" was scarcely needed. Napoleon himself thought that this question was set at rest before 1809. Rebuking a flatterer, he declared that he had been repeatedly defeated, and instanced Acre, Essling, and the first day at Arcole, for it was then, in November 1796, not, as is here implied, in an earlier crisis, that he sent orders to Milan to prepare for the worst. He admitted to Davout that his plan was faulty at Eylau ; and he assured Cambacérès that the new energy of resistance revealed at Essling changed the whole direction of his policy. At Dresden he confessed with magnanimity that the worst blunders of the Russian campaign were his own. Although he despised Masséna for his cupidity, he insisted that he possessed military talents devant lesquels il fant se prosterner. He pronounced himself equal to St. Cyr in attack, but his inferior in the science of defensive war.
Mr. Seeley denies to Napoleon the merit of originality. The art of engrossing power, the kindred art of applying it, had been already brought to high perfection, and he had great models to study. When Madame d'Outremont offered half her fortune that her son might be released from conscription, he answered that the whole of her fortune and her son too were his already. This is no more than a brightly pointed repetition of the assurance given by the Sorbonne to quiet the conscience of Lewis XIV., and of Richelieu's stupendous words to the father of Pascal : "Je vous le recommande." Once he seemed to rise above himself when at the marching of his legions he was heard to say, "Tout cela ne vaut pas les institutions." But he had been warned repeatedly by at least two of his shrewdest advisers that he had founded nothing until he had founded something strong enough to resist him. Having first to account for public and outward events, Mr. Seeley has no leisure to study the emperor in council and conversation. He is visibly impatient of
