won to himself all whom he attempted to conciliate, the warm attachment of those immediately about him, tend to the belief that there was much of good in him. But his eye was continually fixed on the star he saw blazing before him, and in his efforts to follow its guidance, he heeded not the victims he crushed in his onward progress. He considered men as mere instruments to extend his dominion, and he used them with wasteful expenditure, to advance his projects or to secure his conquests. But he was not cruel, nor was he steeled to human misery. Had he been what he is sometimes represented, he never could have retained the ascendency over the minds of his followers, which, regardless of defeat and suffering and death, lived on when even hope had gone.
Accusatory words are easily spoken, and there is often a disposition to condemn, without calculating the compelling motives which govern human actions, or the height of place which has given to surrounding objects a coloring and figure not to be measured by the ordinary rules of ethics. Many a man who cannot bear a little brief authority without abusing it, who lords it over a few dependants with insolent and arbitrary rule, whose temper makes everybody uncomfortable within the limited sphere of his government, and whose petty tyranny turns his own home into a despotic empire, can pronounce a sweeping doom against one who was clothed with irresponsible power, who seemed elevated above the accidents of humanity, whose audience-chamber was thronged by princes, whose words were as the breath of life, and who dealt out kingdoms to his kindred like the portions of a family inheritance. Let censure, then, be tempered with charity, nor be lightly bestowed on him who will continue to fill a space in the annals of the world when the present shall be merged in that shadowy realm where fact becomes mingled with fable, and the reality, dimmed by distance, shall be so transfigured by poetry and romance, that it may even be doubted whether he ever lived.
Seventeen years after the period which I have attempted to illustrate by a few incidents, I stood by his grave at St, Helena. I was returning from a long residence in the East, and, having doubled the stormy Cape of Good Hope, looked forward with no little interest to a short repose at the halting-place between India and Europe. But when I saw its blue mass Leaving from the ocean, the usual excitement attendant on the cry of “Land!” was lost in the absorbing feeling, that there Napoleon Bonaparte died and was buried. The lonely rock rose in solitary barrenness, a bleak and mournful monument of some rude caprice of Nature, which has thrown it out to stand in cheerless desolation amidst the broad waters of the Atlantic. The day I passed there was devoted to the place where the captive wore away the weary and troubled years of his imprisonment, and to the little spot which he himself selected when anticipating the denial of his last wish,—now fully answered,—“ that his ashes might repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people whom he had so much loved.”
There was nothing in or about the house to remind one of its late occupant. It was used as a granary. The apartments were filled with straw; a machine for threshing or winnowing was in the parlor; and the room where he died was now converted into a stable, a horse standing where his bed had been. The position was naked and comfortless, being on the summit of a hill, perpetually swept by the trade-winds, which suffered no living thing to stand, except a few straggling, bare, shadeless trees, which contributed to the disconsolate character of the landscape. The grave was in a quiet little valley. It was covered by three plain slabs of stone, closely surrounded by an iron railing; a low wooden paling extended a small distance around; and the whole was overhung by three decaying willows. The appearance of the place was plain and appropriate. Nothing was
