XIII. BRUCE’S REBELLION: THE WAR WHICH FOLLOWED.—THE DEATH OF EDWARD: HIS CHARACTER. (continued 2)
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Coming nearer to his own age, we find a Charlemagne, unquestionably great in council and in war. But the historian cannot help censuring “his cruelty and his excessive dissoluteness.”185 In private life he was utterly licentious, and in war he could massacre four thousand men—not in a battle, or in the storming of a city, but like a butcher in a slaughter‐house.
Another Charles, of great power and great success, arose in Europe after a lapse of two centuries. But what shall we say of a man who, after a successful, but an immoral and treacherous life, brought himself to the grave at the age of fifty‐eight, by excessive gluttony?
Still later, at the opening of the present century, we saw a greater soldier and a greater statesman than either Charlemagne or Charles V. In Napoleon we had a loftier genius than either Alexander or Cæsar,—a conqueror who marched from Rome to Poland, from Madrid to Moscow; and who, at Dresden, in 1812, “was waited upon by a crowd of obsequious kings or princes, who accepted every word that fell from his lips, as if an oracle had spoken.”186 And yet it has been truly observed that this autocrat of Europe “had not the merit of common truth and honesty; he would steal, slander, assassinate, as his interest dictated. He was intensely selfish; he was perfidious. In short, when you had penetrated through all this immense power and splendour, you found that you were dealing with an impostor and a rogue.”187
We cannot measure or balance the king of whom we have been writing, with such characters as these. He is altogether of another class. Casting our eyes among men of honour,—men of conscience, men worthy of our respect, in our search for a superior or an equal, we have not yet succeeded in our quest. We relinquish the task, therefore, here, and hand it over to our readers.