little orator should have hastened to crowd about him, as Napoleon is now; a man who certainly had not comproffering congratulations, and smothering him with manded as large armies, but who in his campaigns had embraces. For far less matters,

"De son peuple le vainqueur et le père,"

given every proof of tactical and strategical ability, and "Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak." who, in the more chivalrous additions of a soldier, grace, wit, generosity, personal daring, and gay gallantryThe only controversy that rears its head amid this qualities most adapted to win and retain popular affeegeneral happiness and hilarity, is with respect to the tion-far outstripped his more diplomatic and scientific place of sepulture. The eloquent minister of the in- successor; who brought to an end a wasting civil war, terior, it will be perceived by his speech, proposes that and laid the basis for the consolidation of France; who the ashes of the favourite hero of the French soldier put his country-for the first time securely since the should lie among the ashes of his companions in arms. wars of our Edward III. began, more than two hundred This, one would think, ought to satisfy the military years before-in the condition of keeping out of it those adorers of Buonaparte; and, perhaps, so it does. But enemies whom the reverses of Buonaparte brought into there is another party of worshippers, whose imagina- it some couple of hundred years after; who, as tions being more affected by regal than by martial recollections, are anxious that he should be deposited in the cemetery of the kings of France at Saint Denis. The controversy is carried on hotly enough; and, no doubt, was the hero of the only epic French poem, and that after a due effusion of Christian ink, it will ripen into a poem, too, written by one of the gods of Jacobin idolatry, very respectable quarrel. A third party, which however Voltaire, then placed in a sort of hero worship in the seems to consist exclusively of the Cockney school of Parthenon: and yet this Henri Quatre, long the honoured taste in Paris, is in favour of burying him under the theme of " tradition, legend, tale, and song,"-the bright column in the Place Vendôme; so that it might have exemplar of all that was gallant, and brilliant, and valiant his cocked hat on the summit and his coffin at the base, in French history, was dragged from his cerements, and which would indeed be elegant and picturesque. Dis- bis embalmed body, presenting still a semblance of life, missing this columnar faction, we admit that of the other exposed to the brutal abominations of a ruffian mob; proposals-that of the Invalides and Saint Denis-much, until, at last, bis mustache having been hacked off by a as Sir Roger de Coverley cautiously remarked many a soldier-un soldat de la France,—that form, which had long day ago, may be said on both sides. He was a been the earthly temple of his noble spirit, was trampled soldier, says M. Thiers; he therefore should lie with into its original clay by the hoofs of the liberalised soldiers. He was, according to your own account, re-regenerators of Europe. Could they have found Charlejoin his antagonists, the legitimate king of France; let him lie, therefore, among the legitimate kings. The contest may thus be carried on until the crack of doom, without satisfying either party.

We shall soon have to suggest other considerations respecting his present place of sepulture; but in the mean time we may remark, that, so far as safety is concerned, Napoleon is much safer in St. Helena than he would be in Paris. At present, indeed, he is the popular idol; and Shakspeare's disregarded epitaph

(Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he who moves my bones,")

magne, his remains would have experienced precisely the same treatment. What is to ensure a safer perpetuity of favour for the relics of Napoleon? He is out of the reach of such fluctuation of Parisian passion while at St. Helena. We shall never insult him. Who can predict that some new Marat or Hebert may arise in Paris, in whose eyes the assumption of monarchical title will obliterate all gratitude for military glories?

M. Thiers, in his speech. says that "the august sepul ture should not be in a public place, in the midst of a noisy and inattentive crowd. It is proper that it should be in a silent and sacred spot, which can be visited with awe by those who respect glory and genius, grandeur and may be safely dispensed with in the case of the Parisian misfortune." Is it not so now? What part of Paris tomb of Buonaparte. Any insult to his bones would be can equal the silence, and the sacredness of the spot, in followed by vengeance rapid and unsparing. But who which Napoleon lies this moment? But there is somecan say that this feeling will last? Videsne, fili mi, said thing magnificently cockney in the Parisianism of the the shrewd Alexander VI. to his son Cæsar Borgia, as last sentence. Thousands, and tens of thousands, have they entered a town on his road to Rome, shortly after visited Buonaparte's present tomb. What proportion of his elevation to the papal chair, and found the inhabit them is French? It is, of course, impossible to offer any ants busily occupied in pulling down a gibbet, on which thing like a precise calculation; but if we said one in a his effigy had been swinging, to replace it by a statue in hundred, we should most grossly exaggerate. Among his honour, Videsne, fili mi, quantulum interest inter them how many Parisians? One, perhaps, in five thoupatibulum et statuam ?-How slight is the difference sand. It would be just the same if he lay at Boulogne. between a gallows and a statue! Among us, of steadier Not a man of all those who are now making so great a and sturdier feelings, there is little chance that monu- fuss about him would go a hundred miles, or twenty ments will, under any circumstances, be disturbed. The miles, out of his way, to visit the spot where the so-much erasure of the inscription on the monument, charging lauded warrior was laid. If he were buried within three the papists with burning the city, was a piece of childish miles of Montmartre, the attraction of a new dancer folly, worthy only of the weak creatures by whom it was would cast him into oblivion at any given moment. If perpetrated as an act of immense liberality; but we can- it were merely silence and sacredness that are required, not forget, that "the legitimate kings of France" were, St. Helena is the place. But M. Thiers wants no such in an excess of Jacobin fury, torn out of their graves, things; he wants noise and clap-trap, and these are to be their tombs demolished, and their remains scattered to had only in Paris. the winds, amid every mark of insult and disgrace. We do not forget that among them was Henri Quatre himself-Henri Quatre, once as great a favourite of France

If the true sublime were consulted, Napoleon would be allowed to remain in St. Helena. He has it all to himself. He is the sole man buried in the Atlantic who has

66

a distinct burial place in the bosom of the ocean. In curiosity, and share the glories of an opera-dancer, a Pagan mythology Sicily was not more decidedly the patriotic spouter in the chamber of deputies, or any other burial-place of Enceladus, than St. Helena is that of the buffoon of the minute, consigned with theatrical honours giant disturber of our own generation. There lies he to the grave. ·Etre Buonaparte, et devenir sire," said alone-quite alone-a mark for all who sail along the Paul Louis Courrier, when he was asked to assent to watery ways. The islands and the coasts of the tropics Napoleon's assuming the title of emperor; "c'est descenhave given their last houses to millions of men since dre." The present removal is a descent as striking, death began in the world, and no doubt the bones of without any of the imperial gilding to recommend it. many a gallant and worthy fellow are there deposited: but of them, who takes thought? Those who traverse the highway from Europe to India, from the continent he had all but won to the empire which was for ever the dazzling object of his ambition-all who

"On the trading flood, Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape, Ply stemming nightly to the Pole"

Enough of this: we might add that Napoleon's real monument is in his history. Who knows, who cares to know, where Hannibal was buried? And of what consequence is it that the sarcophagus of Alexander is now nothing more than an ornament of a museum? To quote Milton's epitaph on Shakspeare once more, with due alterations

What needs Napoleon for his war-famed bones
The labour of an age in piled stones-
Or that his mortal reliques should be "hid
Under a starry-pointed pyramid?

Dread son of memory, stern heir of fame!
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

all whose thoughts turn to the shores of America or Africa, all who go down in ships, or think of wander ing over the face of the deep.-to them is the tomb of Buonaparte vividly present. No one passes St. Helena, without visiting the willows waving over him. Men going on bold enterprise, or sent to govern provinces If mere notoriety for his grave be required, let him be equal to kingdoms, or returning from splendid rule or where he is. The very singularity will mark it. To brilliant conquest-the soldier in quest of fame, the sailor descend from the hero of battles and campaigns to humof adventure, the merchant of wealth, or each bound bler and gentler aspirants after fame, is it not the case, homeward laden with what he sought-the star-calcula- that, while the tombs of more illustrious ladies are ting astronomer, the pondering antiquary, the learned unknown or unmarked, no reader of our literature philologist, the zealous missionary,-these are no idle need be told that in Cape Coast Castle lie, in neglected visitants; and by them is the grave of Buonaparte duly and unhonoured burial-place, the mortal remnants of hallowed. Nay, nations and tribes-the men L. E. L.?

"From India and the golden Chersonese, And utmost Indian isle, Taprobane,

Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed"

It is not, however, as a mere matter of taste that these mouldering remains are disturbed. As Edward I. commanded on his dying bed that his bones should be carried in advance of the English army to strike terror into the Scots, as it is supposed that the Hussites converted the men to whom are unknown the names of all other Eu- skin of the leader Ziska into a drum to inspire their imropean conquerors, save those before whose swords they perial antagonists with awe, so are the relics of Napoleon had bowed-they, from the Rajah to the Lascar, have brought back to Europe as ominous heralds and precurbeen impressed by a misty and glimmering sense of the sors of revolution and war. In the present excitable greatness of the man whom their masters found it so dif- state of France, when the generation that remembered ficult to subdue, and deemed it so requisite to guard with the actual miseries of war, the dreadful slaughter of her such rigorous solicitude. There he lies in his ocean sons, the invasion of her soil, the occupation of her capiresting-place, as well known to "all that handle the oar, tal, the varied wretchedness of the closing reign of Buonathe mariners, and all the pilots of the sea," as was in the parte, from Moscow to Waterloo, and who know nothing days of Arabian romance the brazen warrior, standing in by exprience of the grinding tyranny of the conscrip solicitude upon the wave-washed mountain of adamant, tion, is fast passing away, a thirst for military renown awaiting the coming of Prince Ajib. So should the torments her youth. The voice of la jeune France is earthly warrior abide amid his wave-washed precipices, all for war. The defeats of Napoleon are forgotten or awaiting the more dread summons, the last trumpet-call, glossed over, and his victories are dwelt upon with inwhich will order the sea to give up its dead." Sorry, creasing rapture. Distance performs her usual part of indeed, is the taste, which would remove him from this sublime dwelling to make him an additional attraction among the tinsel mummeries of Paris-to confound him with the melodramatic sorrows, the tawdry immortelles, the musty wreaths, of Pere la Chaise-to take him from a place where his remains will command the respect of MEN and no common men now pass his tomb-to put him where he will be only a mark for the peering and the jabbering of monkeys—to degrade him from being the genius loci of one of the great landmarks of the world, where

lending enchantment to the view, and a flood of glory bursts before their eyes. The sight of the ashes of Buonaparte, with the theatrical ceremonies which will attend their introduction, the sounding speeches which will be pronounced over his tomb, the recollect ons of triumph or of vengeance which they will call up, must throw all these people into the very exaltation of enthusiasm.

This may seem to be visionary speculation; a short time will now suffice to tell. But there is one plain, practical difficulty, already created by the restoration of Napoleon's remains. It is asked, and we think with every appearance of justice, why should the bones of Buonaparte be brought back, and the brothers and the rest of the blood of Buonaparte sternly refused admission into France? The faction which favoured the pretensions to become an additional raree-show to gratify a cockney of his house was rapidly dwindling; but this event will

He, so sepulchred, in such pomp doth lie,
That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"

materially increase it again. The presence of his relics | the winds, he may lull them into quiet while he disclose s in the Invalides, or wherever else they may be placed, fates as fierce to the son of Louis Philippe as those (not at St. Denis, we may be sure, for that is too far off which he made to burst upon the ears of the son of Priam, to make them a show for the Parisians, which is one of when his vessels, too, were steering homeward, freighted the objects of the removal,) will inspire many zealous with a romantic cargo of blood-begetting mischief. bosoms with the hope that they may be gladdened with the presence of his relations in the Tuileries. The Buonapartists, too, may fairly catch at M. Thiers's emphatic But we, too, may grow as superstitious in our own declaration, that Napoleon was the legitimate monarch way as the followers of Nostradamus, and shall not dip of France, and argue that, such being the case, his family any more into futurity. The approaching departure of should be invested with all the hereditary rights of legiti- the remains of Buonaparte from St. Helena recalls to us macy. We need not say how unpalatable would the the time when he was laid there, and to the feelings legitimate consequences of this doctrine be to the dynasty which his entombment then occasioned. How can we of Louis Philippe. How that wily and long-headed better express them than in some beautiful verses written statesman was induced to consent to such a step we immediately on the arrival of the tidings of his death! cannot conceive. The elder branch of the Bourbons The news arrived in Liverpool in the July of 1821; might have admitted the dangerous relics with less peril. thence to fly, like wild-fire, over the world. The verses They were the open and avowed antagonists of the revo- we are about to quote were anonymous, but we well lution; and the presence of the bones could not have know who wrote them. Why does not he write verses made them an additional enemy. On the contrary, it now ? might, by being considered an act of magnanimity, have obtained for them an abatement of hostile feeling. That which perhaps might have strengthened the throne of Louis XVIII. or supported that of Charles X. may jeopardy the reign of Louis Philippe, by provoking comparisons. If France is to have dynasties of such questionable legitimacy-for pace M. Thiers, Napoleon was not quite a legitimate king-there are many whom the recollections of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, and other fields of fame, will induce to think that the Buonapartean is the dynasty for choice. Are, then, the dreams of the believers in the fatality of l'an quarante to be verified? Is the prediction, which they have fished up out of old Michael Nostradamus, and read and interpreted in their own fashion, to come to pass? Perhaps : for though we do not believe in the inspiration of the poetic seer, we know that a belief in such prophecies often works their accomplishment; and it is held matter of gospel by many thousands in France, and they not old women, that the prosperous career of Louis Philippe is to close this year, according to Nostradamus's prophecy in the eighty-ninth quatrain of his ninth century :

What the fate or fortunes of that Ogmion, by which name Nostradamus, in his strange verses, always designates a king of France, whom some of his present believers interpret to be Henry Cinq, others Prince Louis Napoleon, (for there are superstitious dreamers in all parties, even among those which pretend most to liberality, philosophy, enlightment of mind, and so forth.) it would require a prophet of more long-seeing reach of mind than even that famous wizard himself could claim, to pretend to anticipate. Certain, however, it is, that the Prince de Joinville is bringing home a present, which may be as dangerous to his house as was the fatal horse to the Trojan city; and if Nereus still bear sway over

"NAPOLEON.

The mighty sun had just gone down
Into the chambers of the deep;
The ocean-birds had upward flown,
Each in his cave to sleep.

And silent was the island shore,
And breathless all the broad red sea,
And motionless beside the door
Our solitary tree.

Our only tree, our ancient palm,
Whose shadow sleeps our door beside,
Partook the universal calm,

When Buonaparté died.

An ancient man, a stately man,

Came forth beneath the spreading tree;
His silent thoughts I could not scan,
His tears I needs must see.

A trembling hand had partly cover'd
The old man's weeping countenance,
Yet something o'er his sorrow hover'd
That spake of war and France;

Something that spake of other days,

When trumpets pierced the kindling air,
And the keen eye could firmly gaze

Through battle's crimson glare.

Said I, perchance this faded hand,

When Life beat high and Hope was young,
By Lodi's wave-on Syria's sand-
The bolt of death had flung.

Young Buonaparte's battle-cry,

Perchance, had kindled this old cheek;
It is no shame that he should sigh,-
His heart is like to break.

He hath been with him, young and old;

He climb'd with him the Alpine snow;
He heard the cannon when they roll'd
Along the silver Po.

inevitably be contrived and performed by her, on every French garrison, and then reached Alexandria in safety, occasion where it can be done with impunity The only made its spirit known by putting 1200 of the garrison country on earth which ever exhibits a sense of common to the sword, and in a few days was in possession of the justice in her public transactions, is England; and even country. at this mome t no ministry of England would be suffered by the nation to seize a single acre of the feeblest state on earth, without having strict justice on the national side. This is an eminent honour to the national character, and one which must never be forfeited.

But it is well worth remarking, that perhaps no expedition ever more distinctly failed in all its principal objects. Its seizure of Malta gave that great fortress finally into the hands of the English, by whom it had been immediately besieged, and taken with its garrison. But the first retributive blow was the destruction of the whole French fleet at Aboukir. The next was the defeat of

at Acre. This was followed by the successive defeats of the French by the British army, until not a man of that expedition remained in Egypt but as a prisoner.

Egypt had thus been an object of French cupidity for upwards of a hundred years. There exists a memorial of Leibnitz, then at the head of all continental science, Bonaparte himself, by Sir Sidney Smith and the Turks, addressed to Louis XIV. recommending the seizure, at the period when that profligate and sanguinary despot was assaulting Holland. This philosophic tempter advised him to signalise his ambition more effectually, even Yet the punishment did not end there. France was in Europe, by seizing on a province which promised a to be scourged, and the lash fell upon her with matchmore easy and profitable victory than the swamps and less severity. The allies, encouraged by the absence of sands of the Dutch. He justly told the king that he the last general and best army of France, poured fresh could not pursue a Dutch war without exciting the jea- troops into Italy. The Russian government, relieved lousy of Europe. "It is in Egypt," said he, "that the from all fears on the side of Turkey, by the irritation of true blow can be struck." He then laboured to show, the French attack on a Turkish province, sent the celethat the possession would give him the road to India, brated Suwarrow with a strong force to Italy. He swept and put her opulent trade into his hands; that it would the French before him, and recovered the entire country thus engross the real sources of the wealth of Holland-in a single rapid but most bloody campaign. It was extinguish the competitorship of Europe-and, by computed that, in killed and prisoners, France lost one making the Mediterranean a Frenc! lake, virtually place bundred thousand men in Italy before the end of the Louis on the throne of Europe. Louis was fortunately year. Thus the fruits of the single atrocity of invading as self-willed as he was sanguinary; he preferred the Egypt, and of slaughtering unfortunate Turks and Arabs nearer conquest; brought on himself the arms of Eng- without a cause, was the loss of two great armies-of land and Europe, was hunted up to the gates of Ver- Italy-of the most important station of the Mediterrasailles; and ought to have been hanged on those gates, nean for ever, and of all hopes of possessing Egypt, with his whole ministry round him, if justice had been which they not improbably might have ob'ained by purdone. chase from the necessities of Turkey. Even the more minute objects were failures. The directory wholly failed in keeping Napoleon at a distance, for he contrived to return, however disreputably. And even in his personal instance, nothing but the accidental circumstances of the country could have saved him from ruin. His defeats in Syria had thrown a cloud on his military reputation, which would have enabled the directory to bring him to a court-martial for desertion. But he was saved for a heavier fall. The loss of the Italian campaign, under Joubert and Macdonald, alone protected him at the moment.

A quarter of a century before the French Revolution, Savary, one of those scientific infidels who poisoned the public mind and prepared that revolution, had gone to Egypt, and given a description of it in the national style, --a flourish of romance, in which every thing was dipped in colours of the rainbow, and the appetite of the nation was again excited to seize on this African paradise.

On the conquest of Italy, in 1797, the project of seizing Egypt was adopted by the directory. It offered various temptations to that atrocious underhand policy, which regards every thing but justice. To Napoleon, the command of a fleet and army, which would keep him before He was received by the people, in their emergency, as the eyes of France-to the directory, the opportunity of the sole hope of the country. The battle of Marengo getting rid of a too popular general and unemployed turned the tide again, and that larger course of infliction army for the time—and to the nation, that phantasm of began, which he was evidently reserved to put in motion national glory which is always able to delude France. against Europe. Yet what were even his greatest vicWe can find no counteracting opinion at the time—no tories but so many new shapes of suffering, in which honest remonstrance against the utter villany of plunder- France herself shared with unbroken powers of the coning an ancient ally, and the utter impolicy of showing tinent, in which hundreds of thousands of her people that with France treaties were waste paper; we cannot were sacrificed, only to bring an enemy twice to Paris, find even any humane and natural protest against the to lay the country at the feet of Europe; and even in actual murder of the multitude of men, Frenchmen as the instance of that wonder of genius and fortune himwell as Turks and Arabs, who must perish in the invasion. On the contrary, all France was in exultation at the sight of the vast armament gathered for the purpose at Toulon; and neither among her people nor her priesthood was one warning voice raised against this preparative for wholesale robbery and slaughter.

In the beginning all seemed fortunate. The expedition sailed, escaped the British fleet, reached Malta, of which it became possessed by corruption; and turning out the weak and perfidious knights, placed in it a

[ Hear! Hear! Museum.]

self, only to make him the most memorable victim of humiliation that the world has ever seen-the blasted figure of a colossal ambition.

The battle of Aboukir as one of the most singular and one of the most momentous, in naval annals. Nelson, after having twice traversed the Mediterranean in chase of the French, first saw them on the 1st of August, (1798.) drawn up in line, at the anchorage of Aboukir, with their broadsides to the sea, and protected by guns on the shore. He advanced straight to the mark the moment he saw them, at three in the afternoon. The number of ships on both sides was equal-each thirteen