DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

( a’) married, but at the nuptial banquet his seat was empty; not a note of the merry joy-bells reached his ears, and so he passed away on the 29th January, 1820. No pomp, no pageantry was omitted in solem- nising his obsequies. Heralds in resplendent tabards, Princes of the blood in sable mantles, Ministers of State habited in mourning garb, moved by the flickering torchlight into St. George’s Chapel, and with the blast of trumpets and the sound of muffled drums, mingling with the peal of cannon and the toll of the death-bell, the body of George the Third was lowered into the vault. Fifteen months later died Napoleon I., Emperor of the French. To draw a comparison between these two contemporary sovereigns is not the object of this lecture. But it is impossible to refrain from according a thought to the end of these two potentates, so dis- similar, and yet in some respects so like. An adven- turer by birth, endowed with every talent, quality, and genius, Napoleon I. rose to an undreamed-of pinnacle of power. Hurled down again amid the execrations of the world, he saw his country a prey to the invader, and left it to be desolated by a suc- cession of revolutions, to die of a broken heart, on a barren island in mid-ocean. Born in the purple, ungifted and unwise, a pattern of simplicity and domestic virtue, an autocrat by