The apertator, stober 16, 1852 Louis Napoleon is rapidly casting
his Presidential skin, and before many weeks he will soar into the heaven of his ambition—a full- blown, gorgeous, purple Emperor. The Vestiges of Creation can show no more astounding development than the somewhat seedy swell of six years since, transformed, by the magic of baseness and cunning mutually acting and reading, into the absolute sovereign of the fair land of France and her thirty millions of inhabitants—the unquestioned lord and master of life, liberty, and property, from the Alps to the Atlantic, from the fortresses of Belgium to the peaks of the Pyrenees. . . . And indeed, many a pettier prize has been gained at infinitely greater expense of human life and mere physical suffering, but never perhaps did conqueror or usurper stride onward to his glittering goal through a deeper mire of personal crime and national humiliation than has paved the path to his theatric throne for this Elliston of great men, this model of Imperial deportment, this Turvey-drop imitator of the first criminal of Europe.
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