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endeavour to entertain people who have no means of entertaining themselves'; of the importunity of lionhunters in high places; of the inexhaustible mendicity and mendacity of correspondents whose communications would have justified the supposition 'that all the dwellings in England had fallen to pieces and the houses of the clergymen fallen to ruin'; of the hardship, after spending the prime of life in the field, of having to put its last years at the disposition of the blackguard artists' who made him sit to them for painting or sculpture; and, finally, of himself more than once as the only animal 'in civilised life' who was never allowed a day's rest. But to her also he spoke, actually in the last month of his eighty and more years of existence, of an enduring vitality which neither ailments nor provocations could exhaust. I have none of the infirmities of old age! excepting vanity perhaps! But that is a disease of the mind not of the Body. My deafness is accidental. If I was not deaf, I really believe that there is not a youth in London who could enjoy the world more than myself.'

Those whom the gods love indeed die young, but what of those whom the gods desire to destroy and first drive mad? One such, born in the same year as Wellington and as famous a master of the art of war, perished thirty years before him at St Helena, a criminal claiming a martyr's crown and not altogether failing to secure it. The Napoleonic legend, if we are fair, had perhaps as good a right to acceptance in France as the Elizabethan pirate-sagas in England; for the French draw their pride from their soil and their soldiers and the English from their seamen and the sea. But in recent times, as the literary celebration of the Napoleonic centenary in this country made plain, the legend has found a lodging in British minds, so that the young women of 20thcentury London, if such romantic vanities were to take their fancy at all, might be found to prefer a fragment of the Emperor's green-coat to a sample of the Duke's white handkerchiefs. These reactions are doubtless inevitable, for, if we only extol a hero long enough, some one from very boredom will be compelled to start a paradox either by putting up a rival or himself playing the valet. And Napoleon has sufficiently tempting

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assets to catch the hero-worship of either sex. of course that vivacious women concern themselves with the same heroic features as reflective men! The Napoleonic institutions, profoundly as these have modified the conception of family life, lie outside the sphere of feminine philosophy. Enough for the woman of to-day that Napoleon bestrode the Continent like a Colossus! Enough for her grandmother that Wellington brought him smashing down in a battle that takes rank with Marathon and Philippi! Feminine instinct here draws near poetic vision. Though plainly not insensitive to the fact that it is envisaging the stoutest champions of the Ancien Régime and the Revolution, it yet perceives the heroes, unembarrassed by the thousand contentious considerations regarding military genius and political statesmanship which cumber the thought Mar of historical students-much, in fact, as the poet beholds Hector and Achilles in a much older piece of epic drama. And it is just so, just as men, albeit hedged in with such divinity as befits the demi-gods, that we may, not altogether unprofitably, seek to contrast them here.

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In what manner precisely shall we confront them with one another, or wherewith shall they be compared? Three emotions and a sanction are apt to afford the measure of a man; and we might do worse than try a test with them. One can learn almost all one wants to know about anybody by probing his relations with women, with his country, and with religion, and by laying bare the motive-power behind his energy. these things then in regard to each in turn.

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'La femme,' Masson tells us in speaking of Napoleon, 'l'occupe plus à Sainte-Hélène qu'elle n'a fait pendant presque tout son règne'; and he adds that Josephine, la passion de ses vingt-cinq ans est pour lui la femme type.' Herr Ludwig says nothing to the contrary. Josephine is always Napoleon's mistress in the romantic sense of the word-so much his mistress that, even as he divorces her, he can write to her of Malmaison that it has been the witness of our happiness and our feelings for one another,' and that 'these feelings must never change nor can they, at least so far as I am concerned.' Marie Louise, on the other hand, is his queen and the mother of his legitimate son and heir. To which of the

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two we ought to give the name of wife is a matter that, for reasons as well sentimental as ecclesiastical, may well tax the casuist. But for the immediate end in view the question is rather what he was to them than what they were to him. Graced by all those adventitious aids-wanting to him when he vainly sought the hand of Désirée Clary—that fame and fortune can bestow, a king amongst men, a figure the like of which had not appeared since Cæsar or Alexander, he failed to secure the firm affections of either one or the other. Josephine I was light of love in the beginning and Marie Louise became light of love in the end. Hippolyte Charlesnot to speak of Barras-cuts out Bonaparte in Egypt as Neipperg cuts out Napoleon at St Helena. That is not the whole story in Josephine's case nor perhaps in that of Marie Louise. But, if virtue was wanting to them as wives, some quality seems to have been plainly lacking in him as husband. Though he had mistresses and to spare-Lord Rosebery gives us the names of sevenMasson assures us that 'sa jeunesse a été chaste, et la femme n'y a joué presque aucun rôle.' He was not in fact what the French would regard as a libertarian; and his native instincts were domestic. His infidelity in Egypt, indeed, appears to have been the direct result of the news of Josephine's infidelity in France; a rebound the spring of which was bitterness and disillusion. He forgives but does not forget, and serves Josephine as deceitfully as she has treated him. Yet, as he looks back over his life at St Helena, he makes, or affects to make, no complaint of the women he has chosen. They had realised, at least according to his own account, his conception of womanhood. They had been 'bonnes, douces, fort attachées à leur mari, de l'humeur la plus égale et d'une complaisance absolue.'

There were a good number of things that Napoleon did not understand-the Slavs, for example, and the Spaniards, and the power of the sea-and Western women were also among them. Just as his politics were cast in an oriental mould, so were his affections. He mistook submission for willing obedience, and, in the supreme crisis of his fate, his blunder became obvious. 'I cannot hide the fact from you any longer,' observed a Councillor of State to him, as Herr Ludwig records,

during the Hundred Days, 'the women are your declared enemies.' They were tired, of course, of a conscription which deprived them as ruthlessly of their husbands and their sons as if it were the arbitrary decree of an Eastern despot. Simultaneously, in this final crisis of his fortunes, Marie Louise formally declared herself upon the side of his foes; and this, although, at the time of her confinement, when it had seemed likely matters might come to a choice between the child's life and the mother's, he had, as our author emphasises, made a full proof of his affection for her by deciding for her preservation and abandoning the hope of a son and successor. This desertion in a quarter where he had the utmost right to look for support caused, as Herr Ludwig notes, a change in his physical condition. At his first advent he appeared rejuvenated and lively. Why this relapse? First and foremost his wife's behaviour had shaken him.'

Two women, it is true, did really love him. But one of them was the wise, old mother who, in her Corsican French, had added a saving clause to the congratulations she received upon her son's advancement: 'pourvou que cela doure.' And the other was the Polish mistressthe Walewska-who followed him to Elba and whom he sent away, idly fearing that Marie Louise might resent her presence, idly hoping that Marie Louise might come to him if only she were gone. Thus in the West no woman was found to love him singly and none to follow him into his last exile. He might have fared better with a harem; for in my lady's chamber there was need of more arts and graces than Nature had bestowed upon him. Nor in my lady's chamber only. Ladies to whom he gave audiences, and whose petitions as like as not he granted, returned fuming and furious. 'Il n'avait point appris à leur parler,' says Masson, 'et les prenait à contretemps.' He was, if the ugly truth be told, a bit of a bounder; and, though society women have been maliciously alleged to like bounders best, they flee in terror before bounding despots.

'Wasn't a gentleman!'-so the Duke, as Lady Burghclere reminds us, used laconically to observe of his famous opponent. He himself had been in these matters a gentleman all too much. His marriage, as every one

knows, was one of those fatal acts of chivalry that a less romantic generation no longer expects. Miss Pakenham had charmed him when his parents thought him no match for her. Thirteen years afterwards, when he returned, laurel-crowned, from India, she was certainly no match for him. An officious friend twitted him with want of heart and told him his former-fiancée had never changed. 'What?' he said. 'Does she still remember me? Do you think I ought to renew my offer? I'm ready to do it.' He was as good as his word and, when Miss Pakenham demurred, he answered that minds at least did not change with years. She had nothing of a mind herself, and was foolish enough to listen to an argument that lay on the borderland between chivalry and nonsense. The result was wretched enough. She had neither the domestic qualities which, as Mrs Arbuthnot declared, would have given him happiness at his own fireside nor the social talents that would have made her a good consort for the first citizen in Europe. The calm, the veracity, the largeness of mind that he craved for in private were not in her nature; and in public she was conspicuous only by her eccentricities, of which the wearing of flimsy white dresses in mid-winter and an unfortunate, if amiable, preference for conversing with the least important among her guests to the exclusion of the celebrities, are given as examples. He bore his disappointment with soldierly silence, which was perhaps all that his nerves permitted and yet fell short of what her affection for him deserved. For the poor creature worshipped him in her own way from afar off. Some recently published letters of Sir Robert Peel's show how anxiously she watched and worried about her husband's health. When I look at that precious face, it seems to me very pale,' she said to Peel, who during a casual visit to Strathfieldsaye was deeply moved by her constancy in face of Wellington's neglect. In such circumstances her death in 1831 can hardly have appeared a tragedy to herself, her husband, or her friends.

It is, of course, commonly supposed that the Duke consoled himself for his disappointment; and Sir Herbert Maxwell has countenanced the opinion. It might, indeed, be rash to assume that Wellington stood always firm