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Rh are better than anything of equal compass on the continent. Alike in ability and industry, they differ widely in the choice of materials and still more in their conclusions, and so conveniently complete each other. Both are worth reading, apart from the views they are meant to serve. Mr. Seeley's rapid sketch tells of things not easily found in French books, avoids detail, and judges austerely. Mr. Ropes, his rival, discourses more on military affairs, and is not only an admirer but an advocate. We shall not go far wrong if we take the good of Napoleon from Mr. Ropes, and the bad from Mr. Seeley. It is difficult to exaggerate either. The American lives afar from the temptation of wrongs that cry for vengeance, and pride not yet appeased. He inherits no part or partnership in the inorganic Europe which it was Napoleon's mission to destroy, likes the French quite as much as the English, and prefers the enlightened emperor to the Wellesleys, who called the liberals Jacobins, and supported the Spanish Serviles. He urges how much he was sinned against, and how much the nations might have profited by his sway. Canning once said : "I would not myself, if I were a rascally Portuguese, or Prussian, or Dutchman, hesitate one moment to prefer the French" ; and Mr. Ropes improves this text. Mr. Seeley surveys from a patriotic elevation the career that did so much for the expansion of England, and treats it as an episode in the long duel for the prize of distant empire. A force more constant and irresistible than human will impels Napoleon to a hopeless struggle with manifest destiny, and his wars are subsidiary to the supreme national purpose of crippling England. It is a development of Rapetti's thesis that, in occupying maritime Europe from the Adriatic to the Baltic, the emperor pursued the fixed lines of ancient rivalry ; a commentary on the words spoken to Mole, that it was the English only that he meant to attack in Russia; on the subtler speech to Schwarzenberg, that he cared for nothing but the war with England, which all other fighting hindered and retarded ; on the pithy sentence recorded by Mollien :