Of the love which the French people bore to Napoléon, let his march to Cannes be a witness, where the inhabitants, as he passed, surrounded him in hundreds of thousands with unmistakeable demonstrations of blind enthusiasm and delight. Not even the terrible conscription could rase his impression from their hearts. The general equity of his internal administration, the exact system of his public accounts, the effectual discharge of duty which he required of the state servants, the abolition of idle privileged classes, and the cessation of fraud in the management of the revenue or its punishment when detected, caused the people to love him as they everywhere love justice. Napoléon, with all his other splendid faculties, was a skilful financier; he was opposed to public loans, and left no debt. He had no private views, and his active energies were unimpaired in his vassals’ service. The utility of his public works was commensurate with their grandeur, providing at once employment for the poor and embellishment for the country. His Code was a monument of legislative wisdom, and his Cadastre an invaluable equalizer and register of taxation and the liabilities of property. But withal he was a detestable tyrant.
II. “Such stone immense as feigned Æolides
In Orcus tortured flung.”
The epithet “feigned” is imitated from Milton’s treatment of similar subjects. But Milton was not at all uniform in his treatment; and therefore having paid this tribute to the truth of Christianity and entered by this word my protest against the fables of Polytheism, I do not think it necessary, any more than Milton did, to be perpetually marring poetical effects by intimating that comparisons are derived from fictitious subjects. Thus in the finest book of Paradise Lost, the second, all the Greek and Roman fables are introduced with excellent effect, and without any intimation that they are apocryphal. Thus
Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate, &c.
P.L. ii. 577.
Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards
The ford.
Ib. ii. 611.
——The water flies
All taste of living wight, as once it fled