Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/470

458 between England, Austria, and France, he said that that would have been his true policy. He repented his moderation as sincerely as his violence. He lamented that he had twice shrunk from making himself dictator, and had swerved too soon from the scheme of making his dynasty the oldest in Europe, which it might have become if he had had the resolution to dethrone the house of Brandenburg after Jena, and to dissolve the Austrian monarchy after Wagram.

There is that which bars the vindication of his career. It is condemned by the best authority, by the final judgment of Napoleon himself. And this is not the only lesson to be learnt from the later, unofficial, intimate and even trivial records which the two biographers incline to disregard. They might have enabled one of the two to admire without defending, and the other to censure without disparaging, and would have supplied both with a thousand telling speeches and a thousand striking traits for a closer and more impressive likeness of the most splendid genius that has appeared on earth.