The Westminster Review Volume 9 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1828 edition. Excerpt: ... as the advocate of the aristocracy against the people, he is not altogether an illiberal or disingenuous one. The work may be appropriately divided into two parts; the History of the French Revolution, and that of the Reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. This is somewhat more than a merely chronological division. The two subjects are as unlike as those of the Iliad and of the Odyssey; though, like these, they form a portion of the same series of events, and concern in part the same persons. The former period seems to contain nothing but what is extraordinary; the latter, hardly any thing but what is common-place. The reign of Napoleon affords little or nothing to the historian, except ordinary characters and ordinary events. The career which he ran, had been trodden times out of number by successful adventurers; there have never been wanting just such men as he, when such prizes have been attainable by them: the most obvious causes suflice to account for every event in his history: to comprehend it thoroughly, there needed no extraordinary depth of philosophy; the lowest impulses of the lowest description of human beings are the moving principle of the whole, and few men know and understand less of these than they ought. Where one man is the sole disposer ofevents, history is easily written: it is only to study the character of that one man: if this be vulgar, all is vulgar; if it be peculiar, he who has seized its peculiarities has the key to all which may appear remarkable in the events of the period. The lines of Napoleon's character are few, and strongly marked: to trace them correctly, far inferior powers to those of sir Walter Scott would have been suflicient. And if his storyibe inaccurate, as we have no doubt that it is, in many of...