Paris it had a close view of the crater, it | Marengo and Arcola, got out of the difficulfelt that the ashes burnt its feet, and it re- ty by accepting the statue of the Duc d'Anflected. It went back to the job of stam-gouleme. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a mering a charter. Let us only see in Waterloo what there really is in it. There is no intentional liberty, for the counter-revolution was involuntarily liberal in the same way as Napoleon, through a corresponding phenomenon, was involuntarily a Revolutionist. On June 18, 1815 Robespierre on horseback was thrown. CHAPTER XVII. RESTORATION OF DIVINE RIGHT. With the fall of the Dictatorship, an entire European system crumbled away, and the Empire vanished in a shadow which resembled that of the expiring Roman world. Nations escaped from the abyss as in the time of the Barbarians, but the Barbarism of 1815, which could be called by its familiar name, the counter-revolution, had but little breath, soon began to pant, and stopped. The Empire, we confess, was lamented and by heroic eyes, and its glory consists in the sword made sceptre-the Empire was glory itself. It had spread over the whole earth all the light that tyranny can give a dim light, we will say, an obscure light, for when compared with real day, it is night. This disappearance of the night produced the effect of an eclipse. Louis XVII. re-entered Paris, and the dances of July 8 effaced the enthusiasm of March 20. The Corsican became the antithesis of the Bearnais, and the flag on the dome of the Tuileries was white. The exile was enthroned, and the deal table of Hartwell was placed before the fleur-de-lyssed easy chair of Louis XIV. People talked of Bouvines and Fontenoy as if they had occurred yesterday, while Austerlitz was antiquated. The throne and the altar fraternized majestically, and one of the most indubitable forms of the welfare of society in the 19th century was established on France and on the Continent-Europe took the white tockade. Trestaillon was celebrated, and the motto nec pluribus impar reappeared in the stone beams representing a sun on the front of the barracks, on the Quai d'Orsay. Where there had been an Imperial Guard there was a "red household;" and the arch of the Carrousel, if loaded with badly endured victories, feeling not at home in these novelties, and perhaps slightly ashamed of formidable public grave in '93, was covered with marble and jasper, because the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were mingled with that dust. In the moat of Vincennes a tomb emerged from the ground, as a reminder that the Duc d'Enghien died there in the same month in which Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the ceremony very close upon that death, tranquilly blessed the downfall, as he had blessed the elevation. There was at Schonbrunn a shadow four years of age whom it was seditious to call the King of Rome. And these things took place, and these kings regained their thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became the new, and the light and the shadow of the earth changed places, because on the afternoon of a summer day, a peasant boy said to a Prussian in a wood, Go this way, and not that!" 66 That 1815 was a sort of melancholy April; the old unhealthy and venomous realities assumed a new aspect. Falsehood espoused 1789, divine right put on the mask of a charter; fictions became constitutional; prejudices, superstitions, and after-thoughts, having article fourteen in their hearts, varnished themselves with liberalism. The snakes cast their slough. Man had been at once aggrandized and lessened by Napoleon; idealism, in his reign of splendid materialism, received the strange name of ideology.. It was a grave imprudence of a great man to ridicule the future, but the people, that food for powder, so amorous of gunners, sought him. "Where is he? What is he doing?" "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to an invalid of Marengo and Waterloo. "He dead!" the soldier exclaimed; "much you know about him!" Imaginations deified this thrown man. Europe after Waterloo was dark, for some enormous gap was long left unfilled after the disappearance of Napoleon. The kings placed themselves in this gap, and old Europe took advantage of it to effect a reformation. There was a holy alliance-Belle Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said beforehand. In the presence of the old Europe reconstituted, the lineaments of a new France were sketched in. The future, derided by the Emperor, made its entry, and wore on its brow the star-Liberty. The ardent eyes of the youthful generation were turned toward it, but, singular to say, they simultaneously felt equally attached to this future Liberty and to the past Napoleon. Defeat had made the conquered man greater; Napoleon fallen seemed better than Napoleon standing on his feet. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montcheme. His folded arms became the anxiety of thrones, and Alexander christened him his nightmare. This terror resulted from the immense amount of revolution he had in him, and it is this which explains and excuses Bonapartistic liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble, and kings sat uneasily on their thrones, with the rock of St. Helena on the horizon. While Napoleon was dying at Longwood, the sixty thousand men who fell at Waterloo rotted calmly, and something of their peace spread over the world. The congress of Vienna converted it into the treaties of 1815, and Europe called that the Restoration. Such is Waterloo; but what does the Infinite care? all this tempest, all this cloud, this war, and then this peace; all this shadow did not for a moment disturb the flash of that mighty eye before which a grub, leaping from one blade of grass to another, equals the eagle flying from tower to tower at Notre Dame. VICTOR HUGO. ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. "Tis done--but yesterday a King! And armed with Kings to striveAnd now thou art a nameless thing: So abject-yet alive! Is this the man of thousand thrones, And can he thus survive? Since he, miscalled the Morning Star, Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind, With might unquestioned,-power to save,- Thanks for that lesson-it will teach To after-warriors more Than high Philosophy can preach, And vainly preached before. That spell upon the minds of men Breaks, never to unite again, That led them to adore Those Pagod things of sabre sway, With fronts of brass, and feet of clay. The Spaniard, when the lust of sway An empire for a cell; A strict accountant of his beads, Yet better had he neither known But thou-from thy reluctant hand Too late thou leav'st the high command It is enough to grieve the heart, To see thine own unstrung; To think that God's fair world hath been The footstool of a thing so mean! And Earth hath spilt her blood for him,! And she, proud Austria's mournful flower, Thy still imperial bride, How bears her breast the torturing hour? Still clings she to thy side? Must she too bend, must she too share If still she loves thee, hoard that gem; Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle, LORD BYRON. THE EXECUTION OF MONTROSE. "Let them bestow on every airth a limb, The most poetical chronicler would find it impossible to render the incidents of Montrose's brilliant career more picturesque than the reality. Among the devoted champions who, during the wildest and most stormy period of our history, maintained the cause of Church and King, "the Great Marquis" undoubtedly is entitled to the foremost place. Even party malevolence, by no means extinct at the present day, has been unable to detract from the eulogy pronounced upon him by the famous Cardinal de Retz, the friend of Condé and Turenne, when he thus summed up his character:-semblage of gentlemen of his family and name. "Montrose, a Scottish nobleman, head of the house of Grahame the only man in the world that has ever realized to me the ideas of certain heroes, whom we now discover nowhere but in the lives of Plutarch-has sustained in his own country the cause of the King his master, with a greatness of soul that has not found its equal in our age." After the Restoration the dust was recovered, the scattered remnants collected, and the bones of the hero conveyed to their final resting-place by a numerous as But the success of the victorious leader and patriot is almost thrown into the shade by the noble magnanimity and Christian heroism of the man in the hour of defeat and death. Without wishing, in any degree, to revive a controversy long maintained by writers of opposite political and polemical opinions, it may fairly be stated that Scottish history does not present us with a tragedy of parallel interest. That the execution of Montrose was the natural, nay, the inevitable, consequence of his capture, may be freely admitted even by the fiercest partisan of the cause for which he staked his life. In those times, neither party was disposed to lenity; and Montrose was far too conspicuous a character, and too dangerous a man, to be forgiven. But the ignominious and savage treatment which he received at the hands of those whose station and descent should at least have taught them to respect misfortune, has left an indelible stain upon the memory of the Covenanting chiefs, and more especially upon that of Argyle. The perfect serenity of the man in the hour of trial and death; the courage and magnanimity which he displayed to the last, have been dwelt upon with admiration by writers of every class. He heard his sentence delivered without any apparent emotion, and afterwards told the magistrates who waited upon him in prison, "that he was much indebted to the Parliament for the great honor they had decreed him;" adding, "that he was prouder to have his head placed upon the top of the prison, than if they had decreed a golden statue to be erected to him in the market-place, or that his picture should be hung in the King's bed-chamber." He said, "he thanked them for their care to preserve the remembrance of his loyalty, by transmitting such monuments to the different parts of the kingdom; and only wished that he had flesh enough to have sent a piece to every city in Christendom, as a token of his unshaken love and fidelity to his king and country." On the night before his execution, he inscribed the following lines with a diamond on the window of his jail: There is no ingredient of fiction in the historical in. cidents recorded in the following ballad. The indignities that were heaped upon Montrose during his procession through Edinburgh, his appearance before the Estates, and his last passage to the scaffold, as well as his undaunted bearing, have all been spoken to by eyewitnesses of the scene. A graphic and vivid sketch of the whole will be found in Mr. Mark Napier's volume, "The Life and Times of Montrose "-a work as chivalrous in its tone as the Chronicles of Froissart, and abounding in original and most interesting materials; but, in order to satisfy all scruple, the authorities for each fact are given in the shape of notes. The ballad may be considered as a narrative of the transactions related by an aged Highlander, who had followed Montrose throughout his campaigns, to his grandson, shortly before the battle of Killiecrankie. I. Come hither, Evan Cameron, Come, stand beside my knee- There's shouting on the mountain-side, Old forms go trooping past; II. "Twas I that led the Highland host And how we smote the Campbell clan, I've told thee how we swept Dundee, And tamed the Lindsays' pride; |