NAPOLEON THE GREAT.* THIS book deserves to stand beside the

classical works of Thiers and Lanfrey. The narrative is brilliant, accurate, and up-to-date ; its reflections furnish instructive links between the past and present ; while the grand movements of the drama inspire the author with flights of finely coloured rhetoric which give him a high place as a literary artist. Some may object that his style is infected by certain

turpitudes of the new prgcieux type ; he has committed a graver sin when, as if he were a mere vulgarisateur, he

boycotts the bibliography which every scientific history ought to contain so that the reader may obtain some hint of the personal equation of the sources quoted. We must augment these flea-bites by the complaint that Mr. Rose has not vouchsafed any genealogical trees, proper contents, page summaries and dates, or other tabular aids to study, except a list of Napoleon's dignitaries borrowed from his handbook of the Revolutionary period. Carlyle, who always wanted to see the outsides of things, would have rejoiced at the illustrations ; he would have turned from the half-starved text maps to the atlas of the venerable Alison.

Thiers was a slipshod writer, Chuquet is prosaic. Yet their campaigns and battles have a realism not always reached by Mr. Rose. Lucidity and fire his pictures have ; but for want of certain imponderables not easy to describe, we do not hold our breath when he draws us into "the currents of a bloody fight." Some of his battles are whittled down to mere cameo proportions (e.g., Wagram), and he has stumbled over Austerlitz. Napoleon won that victory by descending from the heights of the Pratzen upon the allied left, which was thereby driven off by the side of the frozen ponds of Tellnitz :—

"A few gained the narrow marshy gap between the two lakes ; but dense bodies found no means of escape save the frozen surface of the upper lake. In some parts the ice bore the weight of the fugitives; but where they thronged or where it was cut up by the plunging fire on the heights, crowds of men sank to destruction.'

This is a fable. Subsequently to the battle the ponds in question were drained to the bottom, and no vestiges of the alleged catastrophe could be found. A friend having men- tioned this to Lanfrey, the eminent historian replied that he knew from another source that the traditional ice episode, which figured in his own account of the battle, had never

occurred. After the publication of his Austerlitz volume be had received a letter from a veteran of 1805, who wrote that, having been present at the battle, he could testify that the enemy's retreat had not been accompanied by the accident tleacribed.

A first-rate piece of work is this author's account of Napoleon's attempt to strangle the leopard by his Conti- nental system. He disproves the old notion that the Berlin, Milan, and Fontainebleau Decrees, with their subsidiary apparatus of 50 per cent, duties on Colonial produce, seizure

• The Life of Napoleon I.: including New Materials front the British Official IC40 wds. By John Holland Bose, M.A., late Scholar of Christ's College, Cam- bridge. 2 vols. London ; 0. Boll and Sons. 1.185. net.]

of English goods and persons, licenses, and the like, were intended to place us under a general commercial interdict. The Rejected Addresses complain that " the arch-apostate, Boney," had made " the quartern-loaf and Luddites rise." In reality his startling ignorance of the most elementary con- ditions and effects of trade led him to the belief that" the more we bought the sooner we should be bankrupt,"—the more foreign produce arrived in our harbours the sooner our wealth would dribble away; therefore our imports must be allowed to come in. On the other hand, we were rich because we sold eur manufactured goods abroad, therefore our produce must be shut out from the Continent. The intended tragedy worked out almost ltke a comedy, and wherever our textiles and hard- ware were wanted they were sucked into the local vacuum, the foreign customer bearing the extra costs resulting from the harassed conditions of trade. Smuggling became a fine art, licenses to import forbidden goods played havoc with the Decrees, and the chief sufferers by this fantastic system were Napoleon's subjects and his allies, who in some cases had to buy their cotton, sugar, and coffee at ten times the English prices. When fifty thousand greatcoats were wanted for the French Army they were secretly purchased in London, whence also the Imperial Court was supplied with certain table luxuries. As to our imports, which Napoleon's hobby encouraged, we did not then require foodstuffs to the tune of £150,000,000 (eggs alone, £5,000,000!). A few Baltic cargoes met our country's yearly deficit in cereals. But under the pressure of bad harvests and other troubles corn rose to 103s. a quarter (now 28s.), the loaf to 15d. Napoleon had not the command of the sea ; he had no swift armoured greyhounds of the Hamburg and Bremen companies at his

disposal. But by a decree forbidding the export of corn to the United Kingdom he could "hardly have failed to reduce us

to starvation and surrender in the very critical winter oj 1810-11." In 1802, with wheat at 160s. a quarter, the loaf ran up to nearly 2s. Such figures now would mean not merely a ruinous bread bill, but frequent absences of flour, so that the bakers' shops would be closed, and even the millionaire would hardly get his toast for breakfast. Mr. Rose's admirable statements of these matters should be pondered by out statesmen. He concludes thus :— "In truth the urgency of the problem of our national food- supply in time of a great war can only be fully understood by

those who have studied the Napoleonic era Com- parison of that time with the conditions which now prevail must yield food for reflection to all but the most case-hardened optimists."

Mr. Rose thinks that about 1811 it was found "that sugar could be made from beetroot, a piece of news which delighted the Emperor." But that discovery had been made half a century before by Markgraf, and in 1801 the sugar of the future could be bought in Berlin. Napoleon's exaggerated love of the new sugar led to the fall of his Minister, Chaptal, the great compeer of Laplace and Lagrange, on whom the author is far too reticent.

Some of Mr. Rose's appreciations of "the greatest warrior and administrator of all the ages" run into the language of mere apotheosis. But his dithyrambs on the Corsican's "superhuman genius" are counterbalanced by expositions of his blunders, lies, and crimes, of his colossal egotism, his combative instincts, his insane impatience of criticism and con- tradiction. The author speaks out on such acts of savagery as the murders of the Due d'Enghien and the Nuremberg bookseller Palm, the oppressions of unoffending nations, the sudden consignment of ten thousand of our harmless countrymen to French prisons, the robberies of foreign works of art, the deportation of the Pope, and °the] sins against humanity from which Colleoni or Gattamelata might have shrunk. Macaulay, when comparing the modern condottiere with the greatest of the Romans, said, "But Caesar was such a gentleman ! " Of Napoleon as cad Mr.

Rose's glimpses are rather too casual. We are told of the man who cheated at cards and pulled the ears of grandees, but not of the party who whispered into the ears of husbands and wives at masked balls secrets affecting the peace of families reported to him by the police, and invented and

circulated through a bulletin an infamous calumny directed against the morals of that model of purity and patriotism, Queen Louise. As to "Napoleon intime," the author intro- duces some of the flotsam and jetsam swept up by recent Parisian investigation : Mlle. Georges, the Countess Walewska, and some of their compeers are briefly noticed. A covert allusion is also made to a circumstance which, if established, would give Napoleon a moral consanguinity with the Herodian house.

Some years ago a Judge on circuit said at a public banquet that when Napoleon broke loose from Elba the English army "alone and unaided" crushed him to powder,—a veracity received by the learned company with loud applause. The main facts and enigmas of the campaign of 1815 are well presented in Mr. Rose's succinct precis of the avalanche of literature in which Waterloo topics are now involved. Reviving the old charge against Wellington for loitering in Brussels when he should have been "feeling Bellona's pulse" at the front, our author minimises the usual censure of the Allies for their dispersion over an exaggerated length of front; he might have added that Bliicher and the Duke were strictly forbidden to reconnoitre beyond the French frontier, so that they could not follow the ordinary rules of war. When Ney arrived on the evening of June 15th before Quatre Bras, why did he not push on his attack against Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, who held the advanced post of Frasnes with a small force ? and why was "the bravest of the brave" equally slack on the following day ? Why on the 16th did d'Erlon vibrate like a pendulum between Ligny and Quatre Bras without taking part in either of the battles that were raging within easy reach of his force? At what hour on the morning of Waterloo did Napoleon detect on the horizon the movement of the Prussians towards his own right? Was it his neglect, or that of Soult or Grouchy, which enabled Blucher to march undisturbed from Wavre to Waterloo ? Enigmas like these, and the many " ifs " of the campaign, have been hardly simplified by discussion. It is the same with the question whether, when Napoleon found his Zama on June 18th, he was in possession of his normal powers of body and mind, or if he was but the shadow of his former self. Here Mr. Rose joins the critics who, in the face of a strong consensus of medical and lay testimony to the contrary, maintain that from June 15th to 18th the Emperor was "in his usual health," thus brushing away, in particular, the intimate pathological detail narrated by Napoleon's brother Jerome to the eminent historian of 1815, Chairas. On the whole, our author seems to think that if the rules of the game had been properly observed the Allies would have lost all round.

The plots of the Foxite Little Englanders for rescuing the great prisoner when the Bellerophon' brought him to Plymouth draw from Mr. Rose, who is nothing if not patriotic, a sarcasm on "the efforts of our anti-national cliques on behalf of their foreign heroes." And he says that had space been available he would have devoted a chapter to Napoleon's relations with the Whigs, which Worked mischief on both sides, and enticed him on to many risky ventures. Where Prometheus is chained to his Atlantic rock, Mr. Rose as good as demolishes the old fables touch- ing his privations and sufferings, and, above all, he repu- diates the impeachment of Sir Hudson Lowe as a vulture preying on the vitals of the modern benefactor of mankind. Why are we not told of the exile's St. Helena will, which left a legacy of 10,000 francs to Cantillon in recognition of his intended assassination of the Duke of Wellington ?