Machiavelli strongly recommends the appearance of piety; and Buonaparte, it must be confessed, most rigidly adheres to the precept. Machiavelli recommends it on the score of policy; and Buonaparte, we see, makes it eminently subservient to that end. His panegyrists tell us, he is religious. If outward forms were unerring indexes of the inward man, few would be more so, but none can be so blind as to imagine, that his religion, whatever form it may assume, is any thing more than superior policy, to cover and mask his wide-wasting scheme of universal empire.
Machiavelli tells us, that nothing secures a people's affection more than great and extraordinary actions, of which the life of Buonaparte forms a regular series: he throws an air of grandeur over every thing he does, and is proud of an occasion of surpassing all that had preceded him. These were the motives which induced him to be crowned by the Pope himself; and while the Pope was at Paris, to surprize him and all the world with a curiosity unique in its
