capacity to distinguish errors from reality, nor judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when attempted to be put into practice.  Returned to his own country, his acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his Government, with his religion, and with himself.  In our Revolution he thought that he saw the first approach towards the perfection of the human species, and that it would soon make mankind as good and as regenerated in society as was promised in books.  With our own regenerators he extenuated the crimes which sullied their work from its first page, and declared them even necessary to make the conclusion so much the more complete.  When, therefore, Bonaparte, in 1796, entered the capital of Lombardy, Melzi was among the first of the Italian nobility who hailed him as a deliverer.  The numerous vexations and repeated pillage of our Government, generals, commissaries, and soldiers, did not abate his zeal nor alter his opinion.  “The faults and sufferings of individuals,” he said, “are nothing to the goodness of the cause, and do not impair the utility of the whole.”  To him, everything the Revolution produced was the best; the murder of thousands and the ruin of millions were, with him, nothing compared with the benefit the universe would one day derive from the principles and instruction of our armed and unarmed philosophers.  In recompense for so much complacency, and such great patriotism, Bonaparte appointed him, in 1797, a plenipotentiary from the Cisalpine Republic to the Congress at Rastadt; and, in 1802, a vice-president of the Italian Republic.  As Melzi was a sincere and disinterested republican fanatic, he did not much approve of the strides Bonaparte made towards a sovereignty that annihilated the sovereignty of his sovereign people.  In a conference, however, with Talleyrand, at Lyons, in February, 1802, he was convinced that this age was not yet ripe for all the improvements our philosophers intended to confer on it; and that, to prevent it from retrogading to the point where it was found by our Revolution, it was necessary that it should be ruled by enlightened men, such as he and Bonaparte, to whom he advised him by all means never to give the least hint about liberty and equality.  Our Minister ended his fraternal counsel with obliging Melzi to sign a stipulation for a yearly sum, as a douceur for the place he occupied.

The sweets of power shortly caused Melzi to forget both the tenets of his philosophy and his schemes of regeneration.  He trusted so much to the promises of Bonaparte and Talleyrand, that he believed himself destined to reign for life, and was, therefore, not a little surprised when he was ordered by Napoleon the First to descend and salute Eugene de Beauharnais as the deputy Sovereign of the Sovereign King of Italy.  He was not philosopher enough to conceal his chagrin, and bowed with such a bad grace to the new Viceroy that it was visible he would have preferred seeing in that situation an Austrian Archduke as a governor-general.  To soften his disappointment, Bonaparte offered to make him a Prince, and with that rank indemnify him for breaking the promises given at Lyons, where it is known that the influence of Melzi, more than the intrigues of Talleyrand, determined the Italian Consulta in the choice of a president.