Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/222

210 the most fantastic and disgusting exercise of conjugal tyranny on Louis s part, and denies that his wife in any way misconducted herself, the malignant jealousy of the Bonaparte sisters being credited with the accusation. Within seven years of her marriage Hortense had three children, whose nomenclature, unless carefully studied, is somewhat puzzling. The eldest, Napoleon-Louis-Charles, was born in 1802 and died in 1807. The next, Napoleon- Louis, was born in 1804 and died in 1831. The third, Charles-Louis-Napoleon, was born in 1807, and lived to be the late emperor Napoleon III. When Napoleon distributed crowns to his relations Hortense was very anxious that her husband should receive that of Italy. Holland, however, fell to his share, and the ill-matched pair retired thither. The death of her eldest son made Holland intolerable to Hortense, and before long she returned to Paris and estab lished herself in the Rue Cerutti. Nor did she from that time forward ever live in any regular fashion with her husband, whose forced abdication of his crown soon followed. In Paris she was more popular than respected, and her leisure time was filled up with many quasi-literary and artistic employments. It was there that she signalized herself by composing among other airs the famous melody of Partant pour la Syrie. The ineffable silliness of the words of this song is not due to her, but to a certain M. de Laborde; and it is only fair to say that it took French men twenty years to find out that the air was ugly, and that it was possibly stolen. Hortense continued even after her mother s divorce to exercise a certain influence over her stepfather. At the first Restoration she was confirmed in her title and possessions as Duchesse de Saint-Leu. But she ardently welcomed the returning emperor, and thence forward France was hardly a residence for her, while her private life was disturbed by constant and indecent bicker ings with her husband about the custody of her children. She bought a house at Arenenberg on the Lake of Constance and another at Augsburg, for the sake of educating her sons, and from time to time she undertook various journeys in the hope of furthering their interests. The Revolution of July gave her some chance of returning to France, but immediately afterwards grave misfortunes overtook her. Her sons took part in the Italian risings, and the elder died of measles. Scarcely had she recovered from this when the Strasburg attempt was made against her advice. She lived long enough to see the future emperor return from America, and died at Arenenberg on the 3d October 1837. Generally speaking, Hortense appears to have been an amiable woman, whose life was spoilt by the tyrannical egotism of her stepfather. She seems, however, to have been unduly given to intrigue; and she herself admitted that she might have lived on better terms with her husband, upon whom she was forced almost as much as he was forced on her.  HORTENSIUS,, was one of the first and most famous orators at the Roman bar in the latter days of the republic, when the orator s art was particularly flourishing and was diligently cultivated. His father had been governor of Sicily, and had left behind him a good name for justice and uprightness. He was himself born in, and he lived to , so that his life and career ran parallel to that of Cicero, whose senior he was by only eight. He had the best possible introductions into public life, and at the age of nineteen he made his first speech at the bar, and shortly afterwards successfully conducted the defence of a petty king of Bithynia, one of Rome s many dependants in the East. From that time his reputation as an eloquent advocate was decisively established. As the son-in-law of Catulus he was attached to the aristocratical party of which Sulla was the head, and among his clients he numbered several of its most eminent members. During Sulla s ascendency the courts of law were Under the control of the senate, the judges being themselves senators. To this circumstance perhaps as well as to his own merits Hortensius may have been indebted for much of his success. Many of his clients were the governors of provinces which they were accused of having plundered, and such men were generally sure to find themselves brought before a somewhat lenient or even friendly tribunal, one, too, which was shamefully accessible to corruption. Hortensius himself, according to Cicero, was not ashamed to avail himself of this disgraceful weakness, and a good deal of the plunder which his clients had got from the provincials went into the pockets of the judge*. Cicero made this statement in open court, and we are thus driven to assume that it must have had some foundation. Hortensius, like other eminent Roman citizens, passed through the regular succession of public offices, rising from the qurestorship in to the consulship in In the  he came into collision with the now rapidly rising eloquence of Cicero in the memorable case of Verres, and from that time his supremacy at the bar was shaken. In fact his younger rival stepped into his position. Cicero s success against a man who was backed up by all the influence of Sulla s party was a splendid triumph, and it must have been a heavy blow to Hortensius. Shortly afterwards he was again pitted against Cicero, and again failed. In a proposal was made to supersede Lucullus in his command in the East against Mithradates in favour of Pompeius. This was supported by Cicero, and was successfully carried in face of the opposition of Hortensius, From, the famous year of Cicero s consulship and of the Catiline conspiracy, we find the two great rivals often associated together as counsel in the same case. The fact was that Cicero was now himself drawn towards the aristocratical party, the party of Hortensius. Consequently, in the many cases which had more or less of a political complexion as arising out of the disorder and turbulence incident to party quarrels, it was natural that the two men should have the same sympathies and be engaged on the same side. So it happened, for example, in the case of Licinius Murena, whom Cicero defended along with Hortensius against a charge of bribery in canvassing for the consulship. And so strongly declared was his sympathy with Milo against Cicero s bitter enemy Clodius that he was nearly murdered by some of Clodius s gang. After Pompeius s return from the East in, and the political revolution which for a time united him with Caesar, Hortensius withdrew from public life and devoted himself exclusively to his profession. For nine more years he was in continual employment as an advocate, and won a number of verdicts. In, the last year of his life, he defended successfully one Appius Claudius against Dolabella, Cicero s son-in-law, who prosecuted the man on a serious charge of bribery. None of Hortensius s speeches have come down to us; and it was, it seems, only on special occasions that he wrote them. Almost all our knowledge of him is derived from Cicero. He was undoubtedly a highly-gifted and accomplished man, and though of course he owed his very early success to his great connexions, yet he was perfectly well able to stand on his own conspicuous merits. His eloquence perhaps was not quite of the highest order; it was not for the most part what Cicero called &quot;gravis,&quot; weighty, dignified, impressive; there was, it may be presumed, an absence of those appeals to great moral principles which give such grandeur to the best speeches of Cicero and Demosthenes, and of our own Burke. His oratory, according to his great rival, was of the Asiatic style, by which appears to be meant a florid rhetoric, better to hear than to read. He had the gift of a marvellously tenacious memory, and 