The attempt upon Spain was completely improper: the Peninsula was the Emperor's; he could turn it to the most advantageous account: instead of that, he turned it into a school for the English soldiers and into the cause of his own destruction through the rising of a people.
The detention of the Pope and the annexation of the States of the Church to France were but the caprice of tyranny through which he lost the advantage of passing for the restorer of religion.
Bonaparte did not stop, as he should have done, when he had married the daughter of the Cæsars: Russia and England were crying mercy to him.
He did not revive Poland, when the safety of Europe depended on the restoration of that kingdom.
Madness having once set in, he went on from Smolensk[374]; everything told him that he must not go further at his first step, that his first Northern Campaign was finished, and that the second, as he himself felt, would make him master of the Empire of the Tsars.
Pope Pius VII.