Recollections of Military Service, in 1813-15 ...

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J. Madden, 1845 - Great Britain - 319 pages

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Page 34 - Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife ! To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.
Page 163 - Louis, by the grace of God King of France and Navarre, to our dear and well-beloved Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, greeting.
Page 267 - His person partook the character of his mind — if the one never yielded in the cabinet, the other never bent in the field. Nature had no obstacles that he did not surmount ; space no opposition...
Page 265 - Subsidiary to this there was no creed that he did not profess ; there was no opinion that he did not promulgate. In the hope of a dynasty, he upheld the Crescent; for the sake of a divorce, he bowed before the Cross; the orphan of St.
Page 269 - Such a medley of contradictions, and, at the same time, such an individual consistency, were never united in the same character. A royalist, a republican, and an emperor; a Mohammedan, a Catholic...
Page 264 - Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne, a sceptred hermit, wrapt in the solitude of his own originality. A mind bold, independent, and decisive — a will, despotic in its dictates — an energy that distanced expedition, and a conscience pliable to every touch of interest, marked the outline of this extraordinary...
Page 268 - Corsica waving his imperial flag over her most ancient capitals. All the visions of antiquity became common places in his contemplation; kings were his people — nations were his outposts; and he disposed of courts, and crowns, and camps, and churches, and cabinets, as if they were the titular dignitaries of the chessboard!
Page 244 - The lancer couch'd his ruthless spear, And hurrying as to havoc near, The cohorts' eagles flew. In one dark torrent, broad and strong, The advancing onset...
Page 270 - Kings may learn from him that their safest study, as well as their noblest, is the interest of the people ; the people are taught by him that there is no despotism so stupendous against which they have not a resource; and to those who would rise upon the ruins of both, he is a living lesson that if ambition can raise them from the lowest station, it can also prostrate them from the highest.
Page 264 - A mind bold, independent, and decisive — a will, despotic in its dictates — an energy that distanced expedition, and a conscience pliable to every touch of interest, marked the outline of this extraordinary character — the most extraordinary, perhaps, that, in the annals of this world, ever rose, or reigned, or fell.

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