magistrate, a Consul.  But there were other Consuls.  He was not content.  He thrust them aside, and was Consul alone.  Consular power was too short.  He fought new battles, and was Consul for life.  But power, confessedly derived from the people, must be exercised in obedience to their will, and must be resigned to them again, at least in death.  He was not content.  He desolated Europe afresh, subverted the Republic, imprisoned the patriarch who presided over Rome’s comprehensive See, and obliged him to pour on his head the sacred oil that made the persons of kings divine, and their right to reign indefeasible.  He was an Emperor.  But he saw around him a mother, brothers and sisters, not ennobled; whose humble state reminded him, and the world, that he was born a plebeian; and he had no heir to wait impatient for the imperial crown.  He scourged the earth again, and again fortune smiled on him even in his wild extravagance.  He bestowed kingdoms and principalities upon his kindred—­put away the devoted wife of his youthful days, and another, a daughter of Hapsburgh’s imperial house, joyfully accepted his proud alliance.  Offspring gladdened his anxious sight; a diadem was placed on its infant brow, and it received the homage of princes, even in its cradle.  Now he was indeed a monarch—­a legitimate monarch—­a monarch by divine appointment—­the first of an endless succession of monarchs.  But there were other monarchs who held sway in the earth.  He was not content.  He would reign with his kindred alone.  He gathered new and greater armies—­from his own land—­from subjugated lands.  He called forth the young and brave—­one from every household—­from the Pyrenees to Zuyder Zee—­from Jura to the ocean.  He marshalled them into long and majestic columns, and went forth to seize that universal dominion, which seemed almost within his grasp.  But ambition had tempted fortune too far.  The nations of the earth resisted, repelled, pursued, surrounded him.  The pageant was ended.  The crown fell from his presumptuous head.  The wife who had wedded him in his pride, forsook him when the hour of fear came upon him.  His child was ravished from his sight.  His kinsmen were degraded to their first estate, and he was no longer Emperor, nor Consul, nor General, nor even a citizen, but an exile and a prisoner, on a lonely island, in the midst of the wild Atlantic.  Discontent attended him there.  The wayward man fretted out a few long years of his yet unbroken manhood, looking off at the earliest dawn and in evening’s latest twilight, towards that distant world that had only just eluded his grasp.  His heart corroded.  Death came, not unlooked for, though it came even then unwelcome.  He was stretched on his bed within the fort which constituted his prison.  A few fast and faithful friends stood around, with the guards who rejoiced that the hour of relief from long and wearisome watching was at hand.  As his strength wasted away, delirium stirred up the brain from its