He was right. I was obliged to give in, during a fierce combat and a long siege; and so I struck long before the enemy hauled down a single colour.

The egotism of Lord Nelson went far beyond that of any of his “great competitors.” Not that he talked much of his feats, (for “little would he have graced his tale in speaking of himself”;) but he listened with the frankest approbation to the verse or song that celebrated his exploits; assisting at his own apotheosis with as much devotion, as any of the votarists who brought incense to his altar. There was nothing so characteristic, or amusing, as the scenes in which he and Lady Hamilton exhibited together, adoring and adored; during that short epoch of their fashion, which policy or caprice granted them, in spite of the frailty and the vulgarity of the one, and the very obvious intellectual mediocrity of the other. The stage was generally some saloon of supreme bon-ton; the audience, the members of the exclusive circles; and the prima donna, Lady Hamilton, whose ample person seemed to dilate before the piano-forte, while her fine full eyes were turned languidly on the hero of her theme and inspiration, and she sang, at the top of her Poll of Plymouth voice, the adulating ode, or the deifying cavatina. Meantime, the conquering hero “leaned over her, enamoured,” bearing chorus, beating time, and echoing every pæan, raised to his own glory by London lyrists and Neapolitan laureates.

It was said of Napoleon, “c’est la moitié d’un grand homme.”[5] This is more than can be said of every hero: for some there are, not more than a third part.

There are anecdotes extant of that ‘royal’ hero, “Roi, le plus roi, qui onc fut jamais,” Louis XIV. which afford a precedent, if not an excuse for the equally ridiculous vanity and egotism of the immortal Lord Nelson. “Le soir on chanta chez Madame de Maintenon,” says Dangeau, “une ode de l’Abbé Genest ‘à la louange du Roi,’ la musique est de La Lande; et le Roi la trouva si bonne que, quand elle fut finie, il la fit recommencer.”[6]

Lord Erskine was so noted for talking of himself, that he obtained the sobriquet of Counsellor Ego. He could scarcely have chosen a more interesting subject. Actors and actresses are apt to be egotists. They live so much before the public, that they suppose the world to be always engaged with them; and yet live so little in the world, that their sphere of observation is limited to themselves and their profession, and to their successes and their wrongs, before and behind the scenes, et voilà tout.

The highest order of egotism, and by far the most delightful and beneficial to society, is autobiography. Where the life, indeed, of the writer is the mere every day personal adventures of pretending mediocrity, it is an impertinent imposition, and meets its just reward in contempt and oblivion. But the egotism of genius, when mingled with great public events, illustrative of peculiar stages in society, is a debt due to posterity, which should be paid: it will not fail to be received with gratitude and delight. Thus have been received the memoirs of all the great men who have written; and of all the agreeable women who have left behind them those charming pictures of society, as well as of themselves, which women only know how to sketch. They are among the great benefactors of humanity; and the gracious sensations they excite render their works a better course of morals than any prescribed by collegiate discipline, or found in the crude pages of didactic essays. As long as we are occupied and amused, we are seldom vicious; and (to reverse a trite quotation,) “angels are better than men, because they are happier;”—so, down with the Doctors of the Sorbonne; and “one cheer more” for the Doctors De Motteville, La Fayette, De Nemours, De Staël, De Montpensier.

I grieve to be unable to add some fair British writers to this list of sparkling memoirists: but the female authorship of these realms is too serious, perhaps too passionate, for the task. English women can write upon nothing but love and religion; and therefore they write little besides novels—serious or frivolous, sacred or profane. Wit and philosophy are very sparingly conferred upon them.

The few female auto-biographists who have graced the literature of England, were confined to the stirring times of the commonwealth, when the pressure of circumstances, by acting upon the strongest and finest feelings of woman, developed her intellect, and forced her upon active and even perilous existence. The two most brilliant instances of this charming genre of egotism are to be found in the memoirs of the fantastic Duchess of Newcastle, and in those of the heroic Mrs. Hutchinson;—both admirable illustrations of their respective classes, at the epoch in which they flourished; the one, of the pure, unmixed aristocracy of England; the other of its gentry, or highest grade of middle life.

In the long list of biographical egotism, I know but of two persons who have got out of the scrape handsomely; Cæsar, the tactician in taste as in war, with his third person,——and Bonaparte, who talks of his splendid views, and wondrous combinations, in a manner that makes the individuality of the man disappear before his powerful and personified intellect. I allude to the sketches and scraps dictated by him to Las Casas, &c. at St. Helena. His life was a perfect epic—one great dramatic action. What a subject he would have been for Shakspeare! There is nothing of scenic effect in Richard the Third, or Julius Cæsar, finer than the picturesque situations so carelessly traced by the military pen of Rovigo. For instance—Bonaparte crossing the Red Sea at the head of his legions, precisely where Moses led his Israelites; the peril in which his dauntless daring placed his devoted followers; and his saving them by one of those rapid decisions of mind which characterize the ingenuity, as well as the firmness of genius. In all great exigencies, the man, as well as “the woman, who deliberates, is lost!”

Another scene, still more picturesque, occurred the night before the battle of Austerlitz,—the moon shining at its full upon the field, strewn with legions of the brave, who all, save the watch guards, slept,—how many soon to sleep for ever!—the emperor, in the midst of his army, stretched upon straw, under a rude shed, raised over his head by the tenderness of his soldiers, and sleeping so profoundly that his aid-de-camp was compelled to shake him roughly, when it was necessary that he should be roused to learn some movement of the enemy—his instantly vaulting on his saddled horse—his gallop to the outpost, and perilous survey of the Russian manœuvre—his return to his bivouac—his being recognised by the drowsy troops, whose rest his horse’s tramp had broken,—their cry of vive l’empereur!—the lighting of straw torches, a spontaneous honour to their chief, till the whole field blazed—his return to his couch, and to that deep sleep from which he was to awaken to the crowning victory of his great career, that laid the throne of the western Cæsars at his feet, and placed the destiny of the emperors of the East in his hands!

One picture more, and I have done. The time, the evening before the battle of Jena, when Napoleon found the artillery, which was to open the action, blocked up in a rocky ravine, from which it could neither advance nor retreat. His concentrated rage, his terrible silence, unbroken by one reproach of the unskilful commandant—his instant decision, activity, and remedy of the evil. Resuming his first vocation of a working engineer, he hastily gathers the cannoniers round him, distributing to one a torch, to another a pickaxe. Then placing himself at their head, he clears the brambles, cleaves the rocks, and opens a passage for the guns; and when the first carriage has passed, returns again to those obedient slumbers, which, like all else, then awaited on his powerful will. “J’ai toujours devant les yeux,” says Rovigo, “ce qui se paroît sur les figures de ces canonniers, en voyant l’Empereur éclairer lui-même, un falot à la main, les coups rédoublés dont il frappoit les rochers.”[7]

That the life of such a man should be written from the refuse of the entresols of the Tuileries, and the gossip of London drawing-rooms! None but a soldier should write the life of a soldier, if he has not the egotism to write it himself. I am sure the Duke of Wellington is of my opinion; and I hope he will furnish documents to some of his own gallant aids-de-camp and companions, to write his military memoirs, beyond the reach of national prejudices and sordid self-interest, to falsify and to disfigure his deeds and intentions. Let him not trust to the promises of living adulation. Be the fate of his imperial competitor his beacon and guide. As to his legislative memoirs, they are written in two words:—Catholic Emancipation!

LOVE IN IDLENESS.

“This Signor Junio’s giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, lord of folded arms.”

How few love-novels are written now! The market is closed, and the commodity out of date. A Scotch gentleman visited us some time back, and amused himself, while the conversation was occupied by a group of morning callers, in examining the books in my husband’s study. He had pitched on a shelf of natural history, and his attention dwelt on Lacépède’s voluminous work on fishes. As he ran over the volumes successively, his voice rising in a climax of tone, with his increasing surprise, he exclaimed—“Fesh, fesh, fesh, hey! Sirs, what sax bukes all on fesh!!!” How many hundred thousand of bukes have been written “all upon love;” from the loves of Petrarch, in a thousand and one sonnets, to Mr. Moore’s “Loves of the Angels,” in one elegant volume! In what various ways too, the subject has been treated, from “Cassandra,” and “Le Grand Cyrus,” in folio, to the Nouvelle Héloise, in four goodly thick volumes! and so on to Werter, in a primmer size, which, bound in black velvet, was hung by a gold chain round the neck of its fair readers, before the age of sentiment had passed away! Sooner than write on love, a modern novellist has recourse to the Newgate Calendar, and the police reports of the Morning Herald.