History has decreed that Frederick the Great gained a foremost place amongst the famous rulers of the world, and that his name stands in the first rank of the world’s conquerors.
But history has also written over his career the verdict,—He was an ambitious aggressor in an unjust war, which plunged all Europe into the horrors of famine, pestilence, bloody conflicts, and desolated battle-fields piled up with heaps of ghastly corpses, above which rose the direful wails of anguished hearts and the relentless flames of ruined homes.
NAPOLEON I.
1769-1821 A.D.
“He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”
Shakespeare.
“Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny; for it is destiny.”—Longfellow.
IT was not physical force, it was the magnetic majesty of mind, which looked forth from those awe-inspiring eyes, and gave him Jovesque grandeur and dignity and sovereign pre-eminence among mankind. No merely mortal man stands beside him upon the same level on the heights of fame. Upon the highest mountain peak of human achievement and earthly greatness he stands alone, looking with calm, deep eyes and eagle glance upon the rolling centuries which preceded his marvellous career.
In spite of all the contradictory views which have been presented of Napoleon; in spite of hostile historians who have stigmatized him as a usurper; in spite of foes who have denounced him as a tyrant, inexorable as Nero; in spite of calumny which has proclaimed him a blood-thirsty monster; in spite of English literature and English criticism, which have denounced him as a scourge of the race, as a “cook roasting whole continents and populations in the flames of war”; in spite of many a Judas, such as Bourrienne, Augereau, Marmont, Berthier, Bernadotte, Moreau, and others among those whom his own genius had lifted into prominence and power; in spite of obstacles, such as no other mortal man ever conquered, Napoleon the Great stands forth the most amazing phenomenon of human achievement, personal magnetism, and mortal greatness.