There are others, you say--she loses a child. Yes, that's a great event. But that arises out of this vast equinoctial event.
Secondly, as all things are predisposed to the natures which must be surrounded by them, so we may see that the element of social evolution of character, manners, caprices, etc., has been adapted to the vast mass of human minds. It is a mean element, you say. The revelations of Albert Smith, Dickens, etc., are essentially mean, vulgar, plebeian, not only in an aristocratic sense, but also in a philosophical sense. True, but the minds that are to live and move in it are also mean, essentially mean. Nothing grand in them? Yes, doubtless in the veriest grub as to capacity, but the capacity is undeveloped.
_Ergo_, as to the intrigue or fable, and as to the conduct or evolution of this fable--novels must be the chief natural resource of woman.
_Moral Certainty._--As that a child of two years (or under) is not party to a plot. Now, this would allow a shade of doubt--a child so old might cry out or give notice.
This monstrous representation that the great war with France (1803-15) had for its object to prevent Napoleon from sitting on the throne of France--which recently, in contempt of all truth and common-sense, I have so repeatedly seen advanced--throws a man profoundly on the question of what _was_ the object of that war. Surely, in so far as we are concerned, the matter was settled at Amiens in the very first year of the century. December, 1799, Napoleon had been suffered by the unsteady public opinion of France--abhorring a master, and yet sensible that for the chief conscious necessity of France, viz., a developer of her latent martial powers, she must look for a master or else have her powers squandered--to mount the consular throne. He lived, he _could_ live, only by victorious war. Most perilous was the prospect for England. In the path which not Napoleon, but France, was now preparing to tread, and which was the path of Napoleon no otherwise than that he was the tool of France, was that servitor who must gratify her grand infirmity or else be rapidly extinguished himself, unhappily for herself, England was the main counter-champion. The course of honour left to England was too fatally the course of resistance. Resistance to what? To Napoleon personally? Not at all; but to Napoleon as pledged by his destiny to the prosecution of a French conquering policy. That personally England had no hostility to Napoleon is settled by the fact that she had at Amiens cheerfully conceded the superior power. Under what title? would have been the most childish of demurs. That by act she never conceded the title of emperor was the mere natural diplomatic result of never having once been at peace with Napoleon under that title. Else it was a point of entire indifference. Granting the consulship, she had granted all that could be asked. And what she opposed was the determined war course of Napoleon and the schemes of ultra-Polish partition to which Napoleon had privately tempted her under circumstances of no such sense as existed and still exist for Russia. This policy, as soon as exposed, and not before bitter insults to herself, England resisted. And therefore it is that at this day we live. But as to Napoleon, as apart from the policy of Napoleon, no childishness can be wilder.