Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/268

 226 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1853 chap, tion of mankind; and the accident of his birth XIV — having marked out for him the throne of the First Napoleon as an object upon which he might fasten a hope, his craving for conspicuousness, though it had its true root in vanity, soon came to resemble ambition ; but the mental isolation in which he was kept by the nature of his aims and his studies, the seeming poverty of his intellect, his blank wooden looks, and above all, perhaps, the supposed remoteness of his chances of success — these sources of discouragement, contrasting with the grandeur of the object at which he aimed, caused his pretension to be looked upon as some- thing merely comic and odd. Linked with this his passionate desire to attain to a height from which he might see the world gazing up at him, there was a strong and almost eccentric fondness for the artifices by which the framer of a melodrama, the stage-manager, and the stage-hero, combined to produce their effects ; and so, by the blended force of a passion and a fancy, he was impelled to be contriving scenic effects and surprises in which he himself was always to be the hero. This bent was so strong and dominant as to be not a mere taste for theatric arrangements, but rather what men call a propensity. Standing alone, it would have done no more, perhaps, than govern the character of his amusements ; but since his birth really shrinking from treason ; but if, as others suppose, they were intended to hoodwink the country, it must he owned that they counterfeited the sentiments of an honest man with extra ordinary skill.