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Show Fournier's Napoleon ft a UGUST FOURNIER, professor, of history in the University of Vienna, has revised his 'Life of Napoleon." It has been translated into English by Annie Elizabeth Adams, and from the extended reviews of it, must be a most interesting book. Prom these reviews we gather that the three main points treated upon are that, the people, not the sovereigns of Europe, overthrew over-threw Napoleon; the distrust of him by the people i, of France after 1805, declaring that instead of their enthusiasm for him as ever since depicted, the support given him was a sullen and suspicious one with a wish that the end might come; and lastly his ambition to be such a world conqueror : that the fame of Alexander and the Roman Em- . piro would be as nothing by comparison. We can 2 all readily believe this last. We do not see any sufficient reasons given for the other two. fl Austerlitz was fought in 1805 and France was I delirious in its enthusiasm for Napoleon, and nine years after that, after Napoleon had been forced to abdicate because all Europe and Great Britain had combined against him, on his escape from Elba, and an army had been sent to arrest him, we behold the most marvelous spectacle that the world ever witnessed. At sight of him, the army sent to capture him, fell cap- itives at his feet. The writer of history whoso vision is bounded by only a worldly horizon, may -state all the material ma-terial facts and then draw natural conclusions from them and make a most logical and interesting inter-esting book; but such a writer would be like an astronomer who would divide the rays of light bya spectrum, and describe each separated ray and give its temperature, and honestly believe he had covered the whole subject. But had he pushed his spectrum out beyond the visible rays, he would have discovered that the invisible solar rays were more powerful, and charged with more heat than all the visible rays combined. h It is so with the historian who leaves God out ' of his history. 9 The prayers of an oppressed world had been I rising to heaven for fifteen hundred years. i The rights of man had been trampled in the dust. They had been made slaves by the assumed divine authority of kings and priests; in the name of the Saviour all the fields of Europe had been soaked in blood; taxation to support kings and priests had wasted the inheritance of the-peoplo, and the manhood and womanhood of the nations had more than half perished. t Then a child was born in Corsica. TJie island f had been attached to France onlyelexen years before, so the child was born a subject of Frande, but every drop of blood in his veins Was Roman blood, and the tiger instinct which of old caused Roman women to drop their kerchiefs, a sign to the gladiator to slay his conquered opponent, while it had been a dormant germ through thirty generations of Roman women, it sprang into fierce life in the soul of this child's Roman mother, moth-er, and was by her transmitted to her son. Th's son had more than the genius of a Caesar, but he was conscienceless, and to carry out his dreams and plans was more cruel than a wild beast. He was sent as a scourge of God, to lay waste and to slay; to him was given a belief that ho had a star which led him on, and he rode over kings and kingdoms and watched as men by tens of thousands, died on the battlefields that he ' id selected with no more remorse than has the. cyclone cy-clone that rends forests and cities on the sloro and wrecks ships at sea. Nothing .could, rtss.st him until the atonement had been sufficient. And then his career closed. Out of the ruins the nations are still emerging. Every throne of Europe is now restrained by a constitution, and the people with eyer increasing energy are demanding de-manding and obtaining their injiernt rights. It was for this culmination that Napoleon was sent, and it is so clear that no educated historian would write a scientifically accurate book without first pushing his spectrum out Into tho darkened solar rays of truth, and heed what he found. |