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. 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

where Wordsworth sometime fell; nor, whatever the moral equities require, will a soldier in this connexion be denied as a rule more licence than a poet. But, when it comes to a strict investigation, the difficulty is to know whether one has fallen in with the Recording Angel or Sir Benjamin Backbite. There seems no particular reason, for instance, to surrender the Duke's reputation before the assaults of Harriet Wilson. A woman who paints her face for gain may reasonably be expected to touch up her memoirs for money; and once the devastating reflexion that to claim Wellington for a client was, in those days of his pre-eminence, the best copy in the world, has entered into our calculations, we shall have to admit that Mrs Wilson's allegations have left us as wise and no wiser than we were before.

In the other case most generally put forward to prove the Duke's immoral tendencies his critics are now confronted with an explicit denial in a very well-informed quarter. 'Their intimacy,' says Lady Shelley, with reference to the relations between Wellington and Mrs Arbuthnot, may have given gossips an excuse for scandal; but I, who knew them both so well, am convinced that the Duke was not her lover. He admired her very much-for she had a manlike sense-but Mrs Arbuthnot was devoid of womanly passions and was above all a loyal and truthful woman.' This opinion, one may add in passing, is much more easy to reconcile than its opposite with Wellington's known devotion to Arbuthnot himself; and the people who suppose the Duke capable of letting the love of a woman play fast and loose with the love of a friend do more damage to their own reputations than they will ever do to his. For my own part I am content to believe that as regards the general issue, my father, who was in a position in his early days, as these letters indicate, to hear a good deal that was said at the time, both at Hatfield and in military circles, of the Duke's private character, got-to use a convenient modernism-the hang of the business more nearly than studious scavengers. He used to say that Wellington was doubtless a great flirt, and gave one to understand that he did not regard him as convicted of anything worse; and this, I suspect, was the broad truth of the matter.

Every man-killer is potentially a woman-killer, and Wellington's charms in his later life exceeded those of the average officer. The dull young aide-de-camp, whom Lady Aldborough found too tiresome to bring home in her carriage from a picnic, had in truth grown, as the years went on, into an extremely engaging old man with a delicious sense of humour and a rare gift of repartee. 'Ladies, ladies, I don't think much of your defences,' he whispered to the industrious guests who had ineffectually built up a wall of books beside his accustomed seat to protect him from the diligent and importunate Stanhope with his nightly quiverful of queries. Very well, gentlemen,' he returned to the mob which barred his path until he would give a cheer for Queen Caroline, 'have it your own way. Three cheers for Queen Caroline-and may all your wives be like her!' I know of no anecdote of Napoleon so entertaining as the first, nor any repartee of Napoleon's so witty as the second.

Who, indeed, can look at the admirable reproduction in Lady Burghclere's book of a miniature of the Duke among his grand-children and doubt, as he gazes at that beautiful, kindly, intelligent old man's head, that Wellington must have been by the end of his life a very great charmer, or that in a fair field with no favour he would have beaten Napoleon as effectively in the drawing-room as he did at Waterloo? His face evidently possessed all the accumulated beauty of a noble nature, all the lines that tell of a long journey disinterestedly performed. To the Emperor, even in the admired death-mask of Antommarchi, there remained only the cold egotism

countenance to whose reproductions artist and sculptor had, actually under official instructions, striven to impart the classic conception of imperial features.

But it is more than time to quit this field of comparison for another. How do these two characters fare on the duel ground of patriotism? How indeed! For it is obvious-seldom as we remember it-that Napoleon had no country. Herr Ludwig makes this brutally plain : 'Does this Italian love the country on which he now sets his foot? To him it is nothing more than the fiddle on which he can play a better tune than on any other instrument.' So much for France. What of Italy? Did not the witty woman whom he is said to have challenged Vol. 249.-No. 494.

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with the remark Tutti gl' Italiani sono traditori' say all that was necessary about that? Non tutti, Signore, ma Buona Parte.' The crushing retort was fully justified or soon to be so. Venice bartered; the Pope imprisoned; the States of Italy stripped of their rulers and portioned out among a crowd of adventurers among whom his own relations figured prominently; Frenchmen and French interests everywhere dominant-was this the work of an Italian patriot? Corsica remains. Can we call this his country? At first sight it might seem so. The young Bonaparte at starting stood beside Paoli. But, not many months later, his personal interests persuaded him to lead the soldiers of France against the old patriot, entrenched in the Island-citadel. Thus the Corsicans, like the Italians, had reason enough to treat him as a traitor. He was repulsed and outlawed, and his relatives were compelled to flee the place. We must be fair, however, even to one who had borne arms against his country's freedom. Not all the Corsican in him had perished. He retained to the end the taste for a vendetta, and left money in his last will and testament to one who had failed to effect the assassination of Wellington.

A man without a country Napoleon tries, in that last phase of his when he is building up the Napoleonic legend, to make himself out a good European. He had wished, he told his suite, 'to found the kingdom of reason'; he had intended that all this savage tale of blood and iron should end in a European system, a European code of laws, a European court of appeal.' A Jacobin delusion-if he really believed it-worthy of the younger Robespierre, of whom he had once been the friend, or of the sanguine and sanguinary revolutionists who still, even to-day, expect to wade through slaughter to the earthly paradise! He had spoken a truer word at Elba: 'I have always been a soldier and became a king only by chance. . . . Out of my great past I regret naught but my soldiers.' A truer word and to be confirmed in the last snatches of half-delirious speech that reached the world from his death-bed! Just before that last exceeding bitter cry for 'Josephine' which closes all, the listeners caught the words 'Armée. Tête d'armée.' But soldiers call for fighting, and an army