have exclaimed,--"The Congress of Vienna is dissolved!"

It was a beautiful afternoon of early spring, when a class returned from
the Lyceum with news almost too great for utterance. One had in his hand
a coarse, dingy piece of paper, which he waved above his head, and
the others followed him with looks portending tidings of no ordinary
character. That paper was the address of Napoleon to the army, on
landing from Elba. It was rudely done, the materials were of the most
common description, the print was scarcely legible,--but it was headed
with the imperial eagle, and it contained words which none of his old
soldiers could withstand. How it reached Paris, simultaneously with the
intelligence of his landing, is beyond my comprehension; but copies of
it were rapidly circulated, and all the inhabitants of Paris knew its
contents before they slept that night.

I know of no writer who has so thoroughly understood the wonderful
eloquence of Napoleon as Lord Brougham. He has pronounced the address
to the Old Guard, at Fontainebleau, "a masterpiece of dignified and
pathetic composition"; and the speech at the Champ de Mars, he says,
"is to be placed amongst the most perfect pieces of simple and majestic
eloquence." Napoleon certainly knew well the people with whom he had to
deal, and his concise, nervous, comprehensive sentences told upon French
feeling like shocks of a galvanic battery. What would have been absurd,
if addressed to the soldiers of any other nation, was exactly the thing
to fire his own with irresistible energy. At the battle of the Pyramids
he said to them, "Forty centuries look upon your deeds," and they
understood him. He pointed to "the sun of Austerlitz," at the dawn of
many a decisive day, and they felt that it rose to look on their
eagles victorious. If the criterion of eloquence be its power over the
passions, that of Napoleon Bonaparte has been rarely equalled. It was