NEW BOOKS.

Evening Star, Volume IX, Issue 2561, 3 May 1871, Page 3

NEW BOOKS.

Life, of Napoleon the Third. Marr and Sons, Buchanan street, Glasgow. J. Braithwaite, Arcade, Dunedin, It is not often that an honest man is fortunate enough to have his biography written in his lifetime. Nobody seems to care very much about him then. He walks about and shakes hands with his neighbors, meets them at public dinners or evening parties, enters into the every day life of society, lives and dies; and then ionic one, who Ims known and honored him, tells the world rvliat kind of man he was. This is not m.rJy the fate of the qu stionably great men, but of those •who may, in the truest acceptation of the word, be termed “great.” But it is different with enoi mens scoundrels. No sooner docs a man commit a murder, or become leader in an insurrection, or happen to escape an accident, than everybody wants to know who and what he was. His name is made—greatness is thrust upon him. The first Emperor Buonaparte was thrust into notoriety by the English occupation of Toulon; the second made his own name, sustained and lost it. In twenty-two chapters and an appendix the even ful family story is told by David iMaerae, who brings it to the downfall of the Second Umpire. It is a wed diawn. out sketch ot what may one day expand into a comprehensive history. It is short, but enough is told to form a key to the characters of the first, and third Buonapartes, and to create disgust in the minds of al right-thinking p.ople when they find by whom, and for whose sakes, so many hj. norable lives have been sacrificed. Both uncle and nephew were selfish. What Macrae says of the first Buonaparte is equally true of the third : their ambition was “ intensely personal and theatric.” In those around him, ami in men generally, Napoleon the First beheld only means or obstacles. Belying little on friendship, he worked with other motives. He often repeated this maxim— “ J here are two lovers by which men may be moved —interest and fear.” The book is w'oijiU goading, and when read will pot be forgotten.