Читать книгу The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 10, No. 262, July 7, 1827 - Various - Страница 5

SIR WALTER SCOTT'S LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

SIR WALTER SCOTT, the author of Waverley, has become the biographer of Napoleon Bonaparte; and the deepest interest is excited in the literary world to know how the great master of romance and fiction acquits himself in the execution of his task. In the preface to this elaborate history, Sir Walter, with considerable ingenuousness, informs us that "he will be found no enemy to the person of Napoleon. The term of hostility is ended when the battle has been won, and the foe exists no longer." But to our task: we shall attempt an analysis of the volumes before us, and endeavour to gratify our readers with a narrative of incidents that cannot fail interesting every British subject, whose history, in fact, is strongly connected with the important events that belong to the splendid career of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The first and second volumes of Sir Walter's history are taken up with a view of the French Revolution, from whence we shall extract a sketch of the characters of three men of terror, whose names will long remain, we trust, unmatched in history by those of any similar miscreants. These men were the leaders of the revolution, and were called

THE TRIUMVIRATE

Danton deserves to be named first, as unrivalled by his colleagues in talent and audacity. He was a man of gigantic size, and possessed a voice of thunder. His countenance was that of an Ogre on the shoulders of a Hercules. He was as fond of the pleasures of vice as of the practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites too much above their own degree; and the charge of peculation finds always ready credit with them, when brought against public men.

Robespierre possessed this advantage over Danton, that he did not seem to seek for wealth, either for hoarding or expending, but lived in strict and economical retirement, to justify the name of the Incorruptible, with which he was honoured by his partizans. He appears to have possessed little talent, saving a deep fund of hypocrisy, considerable powers of sophistry, and a cold exaggerated strain of oratory, as foreign to good taste, as the measures he recommended were to ordinary humanity. It seemed wonderful, that even the seething and boiling of the revolutionary cauldron should have sent up from the bottom, and long supported on the surface, a thing so miserably void of claims to public distinction; but Robespierre had to impose on the minds of the vulgar, and he knew how to beguile them, by accommodating his flattery to their passions and scale of understanding, and by acts of cunning and hypocrisy, which weigh more with the multitude than the words of eloquence, or the arguments of wisdom. The people listened as to their Cicero, when he twanged out his apostrophes of Pauvre Peuple, Peuple vertueux!