FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW, = VOLUME XXXVI. OCTOBER, 1845, AND JANUARY, 1846. AMERICAN EDITION. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY LEONARD SCOTT & CO., 112 FULTON-STREET. 1846. THE FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW, No. LXXI. FOR OCTOBER, 1845. "Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos❞— was a fair enough one (if indeed it existed anywhere except in Virgil's brain) for a nation of heathen soldiers to acknowledge. Bonaparte, however, in that truly diabolical transaction of Venice, acted altogether upon the reverse of this maxim, ART. I.-1. Napoleon im Jahre 1813; politisch-militairisch geschildert. (Napoleon in" To spare the yielding, and to crush the proud"— the Year 1813, viewed as a Politician and a Soldier.) By CARL BADE. 4 small vols. Altona. 1839, 1840, 1841. 2. Geschichte des Deutschen Freiheitskriegs. (History of the German Liberation War, from 1813 to 1815.) By Dr. FREDERICK RICHTER. 4 vols. 8vo. Berlin. 1838-40. 3. Manuscrit de 1813. Par le Baron FAIN," Secrétaire du Cabinet à cette Epoque. 2 vols. 8vo. Second Edition. Paris. 1825. 4. Portfeuille de 1813. Par M. DE NORVINS. Paris. 1825. 5. History of Europe. By ARCHIBALD ALISON. Vol. IX. Edinburgh. 1841. 6. The Fall of Napoleon. By Colonel MITCHELL. London. 1845. To spare the strong man, and to crush the weak;" and in so doing at the early age of twentyseven years, not under any foreign influence, but from the pure dictate of his own gigantic selfishness and despotic baseness, proved himself to be utterly destitute of all those higher qualities of soul, which, in the pages of Plutarch and Quintus Curtius, teach us to overlook the necessary harshness of the solNAPOLEON BONAPARTE, measured by the dier in the generosity of the man, and the highest standard, was great only as a soldier. nobility of the hero. Napoleon was purely A great MAN certainly we cannot call him, a soldier; on the ladder of battles he mountwho, in the very outset of his career-in the ed to his throne; his sceptre was a marVenetian business-acted in direct contra-shal's baton; his laws were the laws of the diction, or rather in lordly despite of those sword; and the fruit of his decennial suprelaws of truth and justice, the capacity to re-macy to France was, after a short fever of cognize which distinguishes man from the military excitement, lassitude and exhaustion brute, far more certainly than any superior- from within, from without the hatred and ity of merely intellectual endowment: and the execration of all Europe. So vain was a great KING, or ruler, he could never be, the attempt to transform the purely military who, in endeavouring to influence human principles of force and fraud, battle and strabeings, never appealed to any positive pas-tagem, into habitual maxims of civilized gosion more noble than vanity, and whose chief reliance was on the purely negative affection of fear. The heathenish old Romans were bad enough, as we see them; and, perhaps, were Etruscan, Volscian, Samnite, and Carthaginian historians extant, might appear much worse; but their maxim, VOL. XXXVI. 1 vernment. To do so was in fact to establish, so long as it could last, a system of uninterrupted war, to proclaim the soldier the supreme arbiter of all human fortunes, to say that the word Right (not to speak of love and kindliness) was to be altogether blotted out from human language, and from human |