The epoch-making reign of Egbert is dismissed in four lines in the Note-Book: "Egbert assembled a Council at Winchester. This gathering consisted of clergy and laity. He was crowned king there, and he commanded that in future all distinctions should cease. He called the new realm England." A marginal note adds, "This is the first king of the Monarchy." The table of Saxon kings, which follows, is Napoleon's own compilation, and must have taken much time : [TABLE OF SAXON KINGS OF ENGLAND. PART III CONQUESTS OF NORTHMEN-HOME AND COLONIAL "Not the Danes of Denmark, but the Danes of Rouen, of Caen, of Bayeux, became Lords of the Realm of Aelfred and Edgar. Courage indeed was a heritage of the whole German race, but none felt like the men of the North the glamour and enchantment of war." -GREEN, "Conquest of England." We have already seen that Napoleon gives but brief notice to "The Father of the English Monarchy," as Barrow calls him. The latter reminds us how Egbert had been trained for court and camp under Charlemagne, who had taught him "diplomacy, that sombre craft, necessary maybe, but a disgrace to humanity." Considering how deeply the conquests and Empire of Charlemagne moulded the channels of Napoleon's Imperial policy, and considering that, concurrently with Notes on English History, at Auxonne he was making comments on Mably's observations on the History of France, it is somewhat strange that no allusion is made to the French Emperor of the West, whose conquests covered a lesser field than those of his future disciple, but whose realm "stretched from Brittany to the mountains of Bohemia and from Zaragoza to the mouth of the Elbe." Lucien Bonaparte spent his years of exile at Rome in manufacturing twenty thousand verses in honour of a Catholic Church triumphant, which had merit enough to win the approval of a Pope and to be translated by a future Anglican Bishop-Dr. Butler of Shrewsbury School. Lucien introduces Egbert as follows: "Egbert de Charlemagne imita les exploits. Comme au temps de ces rois, Puisse la paix unir les rives de la France Aux rives d'Albion, fille altière des mers. As Charlemagne had been dazzled by the glories of Imperial Rome, and determined, as Guizot says, to unite in himself the greatest qualities of Cæsar, Augustus, and Constantine, so Napoleon found in Cæsar and Charlemagne his only idealsgreat in council as in camp. Like Charlemagne he determined that a Pope should bless his coronation, but, knowing the dangers of pampering a Pontiff, he made Pius VII. come to Paris, and at the last moment decided to crown himself. In memory of Charlemagne he wore that monarch's iron crown, taken from Lombard's king a thousand years before, and the month before Waterloo he held his Champ de Mai. Charlemagne with his nine wives also, if need were, offered various precedents for divorce. To commemorate the birth of the King of Rome an exquisite manuscript (which a thousand years earlier had been given by Charlemagne himself, to commemorate his own son Pepin's baptism, to the abbey of Saint Servin near Toulouse) was brought from that town and presented to Charlemagne's successor. The volume had taken seven years to perfect, and was a unique example of ninth-century art. Indifferent sea-power had let in the Saxons, and was now to let in the Danes. Barrow, mindful of Byng's recent faintheartedness at Minorca, is probably glad of an object-lesson from the past. "When the Saxons made their first descent upon the kingdom, their sea forces were superior to those of all the Powers of Europe. But, being divided into small States, their wars with C |