great movement to a freer and more chivalrous Europe which we call
to-day the Cause of the Allies, had its forerunners and first victories
before our time; and it not only won at Arcola, but also at Solferino.
Men who remembered Louis Napoleon when he mooned about the Blessington
_salon_, and was supposed to be almost mentally deficient, used to say
he deceived Europe twice; once when he made men think him an imbecile,
and once when he made them think him a statesman. But he deceived them a
third time; when he made them think he was dead; and had done nothing.

In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo and the even more unbridled
prose of Kinglake, Napoleon III. is really and solely discredited in
history because of the catastrophe of 1870. Hugo hurled any amount of
lightning on Louis Napoleon; but he threw very little light on him. Some
passages in the "Châtiments" are really caricatures carved in eternal
marble. They will always be valuable in reminding generations too vague
and soft, as were the Victorians, of the great truth that hatred is
beautiful, when it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But most of
them could have been written about Haman, or Heliogabalus, or King John,
or Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor Louis Napoleon; they bear no
trace of any comprehension of his quite interesting aims, and his quite
comprehensible contempt for the fat-souled senatorial politicians. And
if a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do justice to the
revolutionary element in Cæsarism, it need hardly be said that a rather
Primrose League Tory like Tennyson did not. Kinglake's curiously acrid
insistence upon the _Coup d'état_ is, I fear, only an indulgence in one
of the least pleasing pleasures of our national pen and press, and one
which afterwards altogether ran away with us over the Dreyfus case. It
is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people's sins.
If this came easy to an Englishman like Kinglake, it came, of course,
still easier to a German like Queen Victoria's husband and even to