Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/261

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 219 President lie commonly seemed to be torpid. But chap. there were always a few who believed in his XIY " _ capacity ; and observant men had latterly re- marked that from time to time there appeared a State Paper understood to be the work of the President, which teemed with thought, and which showed that the writer, standing solitary and apart from the gregarious nation of which he was the chief, was able to contemplate it as s nnething external to himself. His long, endless study of the mind of the First Napoleon had caused him to adopt and imitate the Emperor's habit of looking down upon the French people, and treating the mighty nation as a substance to be studied and controlled by a foreign brain. Indeed, during the periods of his imprisonment and of his exile, the relations between him and the France of his studies were very like the relations between an anatomist and a corpse. He lectured upon it ; he dissected its fibres ; he explained its functions ; he showed how beautifully Nature, in her infinite wisdom, had adapted it to the service of the Bona- partes ; and how, without the fostering care of those same. Bonapartes, the creature was doomed ' to degenerate, and to perish out of the world. If his intellect was of a poorer quality than men supposed it to be at the time of the Anglo- French alliance, it was much above the low gauge which people used to assign to it in the earlier period which began in 183G and ended at the close of 1851. That which had so long veiled his cleverness from the knowledge of mankind, was