The body of the Emperor, clad in his usual uniform, was now exposed to the public view, and visited accordingly by all the population of the island.  The soldiers of the garrison passed the couch slowly, in single file; each officer pausing, in his turn, to press respectfully the frozen hand of the dead.  On the 8th, his household, the governor, the admiral, and all the civil and military authorities of the place, attended him to the grave—­the pall spread over his coffin being the military cloak which he wore at Marengo.  The road not being passable for carriages, a party of English grenadiers bore Napoleon to his tomb.  The admiral’s ship fired minute guns, while Vignali read the service of his church.  The coffin then descended amidst a discharge of three volleys from fifteen cannon; and a huge stone was lowered over the remains of one who needs no epitaph.

* * * * *

Napoleon confessed more than once at Longwood that he owed his downfall to nothing but the extravagance of his own errors.  “It must be owned,” said he, “that fortune spoiled me.  Ere I was thirty years of age, I found myself invested with great power, and the mover of great events.”  No one, indeed, can hope to judge him fairly, either in the brilliancy of his day or the troubled darkness of his evening, who does not task imagination to conceive the natural effects, on a temperament and genius so fiery and daring, of that almost instantaneous transition from poverty and obscurity to the summit of fame, fortune, and power.  The blaze which dazzled other men’s eyes, had fatal influence on his.  He began to believe that there was something superhuman in his own faculties, and that he was privileged to deny that any laws were made for him.  Obligations by which he expected all besides to be fettered, he considered himself entitled to snap and trample.  He became a deity to himself; and expected mankind not merely to submit to, but to admire and reverence, the actions of a demon.  Well says the Poet,

    “O! more or less than man—­in high or low,
    Battling with nations, flying from the field;
    Now making monarchs’ necks thy footstool, now
    More than thy meanest soldier taught to yield;
    An empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild,
    But govern not thy pettiest passion, nor,
    However deeply in, men’s spirits skilled,
    Look through thine own—­nor curb the lust of war,
    Nor learn that tempted fate will leave the loftiest star.”

His heart was naturally cold.  His school-companion, who was afterwards his secretary, confesses that, even in the spring of youth, he was very little disposed to form friendships.[75] To say that he was incapable of such feelings, or that he really never had a friend, would be to deny to him any part in the nature and destiny of his species.—­No one ever dared to be altogether alone in the world.—­But we doubt if any man ever passed through life, sympathising