Cosmo Latham at the threshold of life had adopted neither of the contrasted views of Napoleon Emperor entertained by his contemporaries. For him as for his father before him, the world offered a scene of conflicting emotions in which facts appraised by reason preserved a mysterious complexity and a dual character. One evening during an artless discussion with young men of his own age, it had occurred to him to say that Bonaparte seemed to be the only man amongst a lot of old scarecrows. "Look how he knocks them over," he had explained. A moment of silence followed. Then a voice objected: 

 "Then perhaps he is not so great as some of you try to make him out." 

 "I didn't mean that exactly," said Cosmo in a sobered tone. "Nobody can admire that man more than I do. Perhaps the world may be none the worse for a scarecrow here and there left on the borders of what is right or just. I only wished to express my sense of the moving force in his genius." 

 "What does he stand for?" asked the same voice. 

 Cosmo shook his head. "Many things, and some of them too obvious to mention. But I can't help thinking that there are some which we cannot see yet." 

 "And some of them that are dead already," retorted his interlocutor. "They died in his very hands. But there is one thing for which he stands and that will never die. You seem to have forgotten it. It is the spirit of hostility to this nation; to what we in this room, with our different views and opinions, stand for in the last instance." 

 "Oh, that!" said Cosmo confidently. "What we stand for isn't an old scarecrow. Great as he is he will never knock that over. His arm is not long enough, however far his thoughts may go. He has got to work with common men." 

 "I don't know what you mean. What else are we? I believe you admire him." 

 "I do," confessed Cosmo sturdily. 

 This did not prevent him from joining the army in Spain before the year was out, and that without asking for Sir Charles's approval. Sir Charles condemned severely the policy of using the forces of the Crown in the Peninsula. He did not like the ministry of the day and he had a strong prejudice against all the Wellesleys to whose aggrandizement this whole policy seemed effected. But when at the end of a year and a half, after the final victory of Toulouse, his son appeared in Yorkshire, the two made up for the past 

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