crime, or to create horror if she should term it virtue! To be just and instructive, we must unhesitatingly associate these two words; or rather it is impossible to designate what we must despair to define. This man was, and must ever remain, shadowy-undefined.

2. There is a design in his life, and this design is vast-the reign of reason by the medium of democracy. There is a momentum, and that momentum is divine-it was a thirst after the truth and justice in the laws. There is an action, and that action is meritorious-it is the struggle, for life and death, against vice, lying, and despotism. There is a devotion, and this devotion is as constant, absolute, as an antique immolation-it was the sacrifice of himself, his youth, his repose, his happiness, his ambition, his life, his memory, and his work. Finally, there is a means, and that means is, in turns, execrable or legitimate-it is popularity. He caressed the people by its ignoble tendencies, he exaggerated suspicion, excited envy, sharpened anger, envenomed vengeance.

3. He opened the veins of the social body to cure the disease; but he allowed life to flow out, pure or impure, with indifference, without casting himself between the victims and the executioners. He did not desire evil, and yet accepted it. He surrendered, to what he believed the pressure of situation, the heads of the king, the queen, their innocent sister. He yielded to pretended necessity the head of Vergniaud, to fear and domination the head of Danton. He allowed his name to serve, for eighteen months, as the standard of the scaffold and the justification of death. He hoped subsequently to redeem that which is never redeemed-present crime-through the purity, the holiness of future institutions.

4. He was intoxicated with the perspective of public felicity, while France was palpitating on the block. He desired to extirpate, with the iron blade, all the ill-growing roots of the social soil. He believed himself to be the right hand of Providence, because he had the feeling and plan of it in his imagination. He put himself in the place of God. He desired to be the exterminating and creative genius of the Revolution.

He forgot that if every man thus made a deity of himself, there could only remain one man on the globe at the end of the world, and that this last man would be the assassin of all the others. He besmeared with blood the purest doctrines of philosophy. He inspired the future with a dread of the people's reign, repugnance to the institution of the republic, a doubt of liberty. He fell at last in his first struggle with the terror, because he did not acquire, by resisting it at first, the right of power to quell it. . . . .

5. Robespierre's crowning misfortune in perishing was not so much in falling and dragging down the republic with him, as in not bequeathing to democracy, in the memory of the man who had desired to personify it most faithfully, one of those pure, bright, immortal figures which avenge a cause for the abandonment of fortune, and protest against ruin by the unqualified and unreserved admiration with which they inspire posterity. The republic required a Cato of Utica in the mar tyrology of its founders. Robespierre was only its Marius, without his sword. The democracy required a glory whose rays should be forever resplendent with the name of some man from its cradle. Robespierre only reached undeviating firmness of purpose, unquestionable incorruptibility, and unbounded remorse. This was the punishment of this man― the punishment of the people-of the time, as of the future. A cause is frequently but the name of an individual. The cause of the democracy should not be condemned to veil or justify that of Robespierre. The type of democracy should be magnanimous, generous, clement, and indisputable as truth. . .

...

6. The Revolution had only lasted five years. These five years are five centuries for France. Never perhaps on the earth, at any period since the commencement of the Christian era, did any country produce, in so short a space of time, such an eruption of ideas, men, natures, characters, geniuses, talents, catastrophes, crimes, and virtues, as, during these convulsive throes of the social and political fabric, did the country which is called by the name of France.

The Battle of Lodi.—Bourrienne.

[Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica, August 15, 1769, but was sent to France at an early age, and educated in the military school at Brienne, where he distinguished himself by his devotion to the study of mathematics and by his fondness for military exercises. At the siege of Toulon, in 1793, he displayed in a conspicuous manner his singular military talents and courage. After the fall of Robespierre a new constitution was adopted, according to which the government was vested in the Council of the Five Hundred, whose function was to propose laws; the Council of the Ancients, who were to sanction them; and an executive Directory, composed of four members. This constitution being opposed by the Parisians, and an insurrection being threatened, Bonaparte received command of the governmental forces and successfully dispersed those of the sections, or wards of the city (Oct. 5, 1794). In 1796 he received the appointment of General of the Army of Italy, and, proceeding to that country, he defeated the Austrians and Sardinians in several battles, finally compelling both to submit to the terms which he imposed. The following account of the Battle of Lodi, perhaps the most brilliant victory of this campaign, is taken from the Memoirs" of Bourrienne, Napoleon's secretary.]

1. Ir now remained to cross the river [the Adda]; but thirty pieces of cannon placed in battery, some at the further end of the old bridge, and some a little above, and others a little below it, on the left bank, in order to produce a crossfire, seemed to render such an enterprise impossible. More than one brave republican general recommended a pause, which must have ended in a retreat; but Bonaparte, keeping his eyes fixed and his hand pointing at the bridge, said, "That is the way to Milan-to Rome-to the possession of all Italy— we must cross, let it cost what it may. It must not be said that the tributary Adda stopped those heroes who had forced the Po!"

2. On this occasion the French were pretty well supplied with artillery, and their first operation was to open a heavy fire across the river on the eneray's guns. General Beaumont, who commanded the cavalry, was sent to pass the Adda at the ford about a league above the bridge, and he took with him some flying artillery, with which he was to command the right flank of the Austrians. By an inconceivable imbecility the ford was not sufficiently guarded, and Beaumont, though not without difficulty, passed through it with his horses and guns. As soon as Bonaparte saw that the head of the French cavalry

were forming on the left bank of the Adda, and that the manœuvre gave great uneasiness to the Austrians, he pointed his sword at the bridge and sounded the charge.

3. It was on the 10th of May, 1796, and about six o'clock in the evening, when four thousand picked men, shouting "Vive la République!" advanced on the bridge, which was literally swept by the enemy's guns. The first effect was tremendous; the French was involved in a murderous hail-storm of cannonballs, grape-shot, and musket-balls; they stopped-for a moment they wavered. Then Bonaparte,--and Lannes,—and Berthier,— and Massena, and Cervoni,-and Dallemagne,-and Dupas,threw themselves at the head of the columns, which dashed across the bridge, and up to the mouths of the enemy's guns. Lannes was the first to reach the left bank of the Adda; Napoleon, the second. The Austrian artillerymen were bayonetted at their guns before Beaulieu could get to their rescue; for this doomed old general had kept his infantry too far in the rear of the bridge.

4. By this means, also, the French infantry were enabled to debouch from the tete-du-pont [head of the bridge], and form in pretty good order. The battle, however, was not over. Though stupid, Beaulieu was brave, and the Austrian troops had not yet lost their dogged obstinacy. They concentrated a little behind the river-they put their remaining artillery in battery and for some minutes it seemed doubtful whether they would not drive their foes back to the blood-covered bridge, or into the waters of the Adda. But, in addition to Beaumont, who acted with his cavalry on their right flank, Augereau now came up from Borghetto to the opportune assistance of his comrades.

5. Then Beaulieu retreated, but in such good order that the French made but few prisoners. The shades of night closed over a scene of horror; between the town and bridge of Lodi, and the scene of the prolonged action on the left bank, two thousand five hundred men and four hundred horses, on the part of the Austrians, lay dead or wounded, and the French could not have left fewer than two thousand men in the same

condition, although Bonaparte owned only to the loss of four hundred. This battle, which he used to call "The terrible passage of the bridge of Lodi," carried his fame to the highest pitch, while the great personal bravery he displayed in it endeared him to the troops.

6. The men who cannot always appreciate military genius. and science, know perfectly well how to estimate courage, and they soon idolize a commander that shows himself ready to share in their greates; dangers. It was on this occasion that the soldiers gave Bonaparte the honorary and affectionate nicname of "the Little Corporal." He was then slight in figure, and had almost an effeminate appearance. "It was a strange sight," says a French veteran, "to see him on that day on foot on the bridge, under a feu d'enfer, and mixed up with our tall grenadiers he looked like a little boy."

7. Those men of routine and prescription, the Austrian officers, who adhered to the old system of warfare, could not comprehend his new conceptions and innovations. "This beardless youth ought to have been beaten over and over again," said poor Beaulieu, "for who ever saw such tactics?" A day or two after the battle of Lodi, an old Hungarian officer who did not know his person, was brought prisoner to the French commander-in-chief. "Well," said Bonaparte, "what do you think of the state of the war now ?"-"Nothing can be worse on your side," replied the old martinet". "Here you have a youth who absolutely knows nothing of the rules of war; to-day he is in our rear, to-morrow on our flank, next day again in our front. Such gross violations of the principles of the art of war are not to be supported."

[After his return from an expedition to Egypt, Napoleon overturned the government of the Directory, and caused himself to be elected First Consul. Subsequently he was made Consul for life, and finally Emperor of the French (1804). After an unparalleled career of victory, he was defeated in the Russian expedition, in consequence of the burning of Moscow by the Russians, in order to prevent his wintering there. This event is described in the following selection.]