The Second Funeral of Napoleon | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, [email protected].

The Second Funeral of Napoleon
by William Makepeace Thackeray "by Michael Angelo Titmarch."
I. On the Disinterment of Napoleon at St. Helena
II. On the Voyage from St. Helena to Paris
III. On the Funeral Ceremony

I.
ON THE DISINTERMENT OF NAPOLEON AT ST. HELENA.
MY DEAR ----,--It is no easy task in this world to distinguish between
what is great in it, and what is mean; and many and many is the puzzle
that I have had in reading History (or the works of fiction which go by
that name), to know whether I should laud up to the skies, and
endeavor, to the best of my small capabilities, to imitate the remarkable
character about whom I was reading, or whether I should fling aside the
book and the hero of it, as things altogether base, unworthy, laughable,
and get a novel, or a game of billiards, or a pipe of tobacco, or the
report of the last debate in the House, or any other employment which
would leave the mind in a state of easy vacuity, rather than pester it
with a vain set of dates relating to actions which are in themselves not
worth a fig, or with a parcel of names of people whom it can do one no
earthly good to remember.
It is more than probable, my love, that you are acquainted with what is
called Grecian and Roman history, chiefly from perusing, in very early
youth, the little sheepskin-bound volumes of the ingenious Dr.
Goldsmith, and have been indebted for your knowledge of the English
annals to a subsequent study of the more voluminous works of Hume

and Smollett. The first and the last-named authors, dear Miss Smith,
have written each an admirable history,--that of the Reverend Dr.
Primrose, Vicar of Wakefield, and that of Mr. Robert Bramble, of
Bramble Hall--in both of which works you will find true and instructive
pictures of human life, and which you may always think over with
advantage. But let me caution you against putting any considerable
trust in the other works of these authors, which were placed in your
hands at school and afterwards, and in which you were taught to
believe. Modern historians, for the most part, know very little, and,
secondly, only tell a little of what they know.
As for those Greeks and Romans whom you have read of in
"sheepskin," were you to know really what those monsters were, you
would blush all over as