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322 comments on them. In the sprawling chirography which is familiar to us all through his autograph and its engraved facsimile attached to his various portraits, might be seen such words as these:

And other annotations of a similar sarcastic character. The "Times' Scrap Book" the Emperor eventually presented to Peyton for the farther purpose of making use of the knowledge it conveyed in the columns of the "Chronicle;" for the "Times" was now beginning to hurl thunderbolts at the "Chronicle" and unhesitatingly to denounce it as a subsidized journal, a disgrace to the country in which it was issued, a stain on the escutcheon of the British-lion-newspaper press, and much more of a like character. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, and the guilty "Chronicle," with the vacillating and incompetent Peyton at its head, made but feeble effort at refutation, and, day by day, the once noble and powerful "Chronicle" sank lower and lower into the slough of political despond. The "Times' Scrap Book" was never much used by Peyton in the manner desired by the Emperor, but lay in grim state on a table in his drawing-room, where it carried off the honors from the photograph albums as a curiosity of the most curious sort. So much was it esteemed by Mr. John Bigelow (then Consul, since Minister to France), who took the greatest delight in examining it, that he offered Peyton one thousand francs for it, well knowing that in years to come, when the great leveller, Death, should have paralyzed the hand which had done this clipping, and pasting, and annotating work, the value of the book, as a curious souvenir of Napoleon III., would be greater than even now. But Peyton would not—perhaps dared not—sell it, and kept it by him till it shared the fate of everything the man's hands touched. It was lost.

Spite of himself, Peyton was now obliged to pass the most of his time in London, as the "Chronicle," hopelessly entangled, encountered a new enemy in the person of the Count (now Duke) de Persigny, an obstinate and zealous partisan of the "dynastie Napoléonienne," who had recently been sent to fill the post of Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Easily suspecting that the "Chronicle" was subsidized by his sovereign, De Persigny, in few but explicit words, attacked the subject, and told the Emperor that it was a piece of folly to keep pouring money into the rotten coffers of the old house in the Strand, when the same money, judiciously and secretly distributed about among other, and "live" journals (of which the "Morning Post" was to be one), would be of vast benefit to the cause of Imperialism in England. The "Chronicle's" opinion, said De Persigny, went for nothing in a political sense; and it was quite true that so strong had the hatred of it