officer, or a clerk to win a fifty-pound advance in his salary. He had
sprung in an instant out of nothing into everything. One month people
were asking who he was, the next he had broken out in the north of Italy
like the plague; Venice and Genoa withered at the touch of this swarthy
ill-nourished boy. He cowed the soldiers in the field, and he outwitted
the statesmen in the council chamber. With a frenzy of energy he rushed
to the east, and then, while men were still marvelling at the way in
which he had converted Egypt into a French department, he was back again
in Italy and had beaten Austria for the second time to the earth. He
travelled as quickly as the rumour of his coming; and where he came
there were new victories, new combinations, the crackling of old systems
and the blurring of ancient lines of frontier. Holland, Savoy,
Switzerland--they were become mere names upon the map. France was
eating into Europe in every direction. They had made him Emperor, this
beardless artillery officer, and without an effort he had crushed down
those Republicans before whom the oldest king and the proudest nobility
of Europe had been helpless. So it came about that we, who watched him
dart from place to place like the shuttle of destiny, and who heard his
name always in connection with some new achievement and some new
success, had come at last to look upon him as something more than human,
something monstrous, overshadowing France and menacing Europe. His
giant presence loomed over the continent, and so deep was the impression
which his fame had made in my mind that, when the English sailor pointed
confidently over the darkening waters, and cried 'There's Boney!' I
looked up for the instant with a foolish expectation of seeing some
gigantic figure, some elemental creature, dark, inchoate, and
threatening, brooding over the waters of the Channel. Even now, after
the long gap of years and the knowledge of his downfall, that great man
casts his spell upon you, but all that you read and all that you hear
cannot give you an idea of what his name meant in the days when he was