NAPOLEON AND ENGLISH HISTORY.
Napoleon's Notes on English History Made on the Eve of the French Revolution. By Henry Foljambe Hall. (J. M. Dent and Co. 7s. 6d.)—A very pathetic interest attaches to this book, to the author of which Napoleon I. was almost as much of a hero as be was to Hazlitt. While the final proofs of the work were passing through the press he "was seized by a sudden attack of an old complaint, and passed away in the very height of his man- hood and of his faculties." His publisher, Mr. Dent, testifies to "the eagerness with which he used his life, and so rapidly burnt it up that he could not have hoped to have lived to an old age." Napoleon was his hero, and he had planned a number of works to clear that hero's memory of the results of the "mud-throwing of a hundred years." This volume gives, with comments and elucida- tions, the notes on English history which ,Napoleon as a humble officer wrote in Auxonne in 1788, on the very eve of that French Revolution which was to invest him with the character of a maker as well as of a student of national life. The industry of Mr. Hall, as exhibited in his unearthing of the sources from which Napoleon drew his inspiration—such as Rapin, Carte, and Barrow—is enormous. Mr. Hall is no Dryasdust, but one of the liveliest of writers, as may be gathered from such a typical passage as this :— "Writers who quaff the Pierian spring of history at its source are apt to end in mental typhoid. Is the old-fashioned stone filter of Rapin never to be tested again, or do we really prefer the metallic flavour of which Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks, and which, as regards England, began with the showy filtre rapide of Hume and ended in the aromatic germicides of Macaulay and Fronde ? " Mr. Hall gives the whole story of Napoleon's writing of these notes. He was in dire poverty at the time; "one small chamber with but one window was his bedroom, study, and living room, with a bed, a table, a sofa, a wooden chair, and six rush- bottomed chairs for his furniture." The notes of Napoleon, which cover English history from the earliest times to the Revolution of 1688, are, to the ordinary as distinguished from the expert or erudite reader, notable mainly for the skill with which he con- denses into a few words a whole period. Here is the entire story of Scottish patriotism in a nutshell :—" This year appeared in Scotland the renowned patriot Wallace, a rare man, to be com- pared with any of the greatest which the world has produced. He unfurled amid his countrymen the flag of Liberty. He beat the English at the Battle of Stirling, slaying five thousand of them, was declared Regent of the kingdom, was beaten at Falkirk by the treason of the Comyns and the Stuarts, and resigned the Regency in order not to give cause of offence to the Scottish lords." Or take this " essence " of a once popular view of Cromwell :— " Cromwell was in early days a libertine ; religion took possession of him, and he became a prophet. Courageous, clever, deceitful, dissimulating, his early principles of lofty republicanism yielded to the devouring flames of his ambition, and having tasted the sweets of power he aspired to the pleasure of reigning alone." Napoleon's notes are worth reading for their own sake ; as given in this volume, with abundant—if not superabundant—and minute explanations, they constitute a most valuable survey of a most important portion of British history.
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