Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Britain's war with Napoleon was brewing in 1803, the martial spirit swept the lyrical circles of Britain's Lake District. Poet William Wordsworth bought himself a red coat, drilled with the Ambleside Volunteers. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote patriotic sonnets and coined a deathless phrase: "The Corsican upstart...
...Essayist William Hazlitt was in despair. He claimed that his friends were betraying their revolutionary principles, that Napoleon was "the best hope of the Cause of the Peoples of the earth." When he mixed Napoleonic politics with a tumultuous passion for a local lass, the Lake District peasantry beat Hazlitt up. The advocate of revolution fled to Coleridge's house for fresh shoes. Then he stumbled on to Wordsworth's house, where he shook off his pursuers, borrowed enough money to take him home to London, where direct action was a merely literary theory...
After Waterloo. Politics and his infatuation for Napoleon at last became an obsession. Wherever Hazlitt went, complained one of his friends, he took his politics "like a mastiff, by his side." Cried Hazlitt: "There was at no time so great danger from the recent and unestablished tyranny of Buonaparte as from that of ancient governments." After Waterloo, Hazlitt sank into unkempt despair. While Poet Laureate Southey and Poet Laureate-to-be Wordsworth celebrated Britain's victory with "boiled plum puddings" eaten al fresco by the light of blazing tar barrels, Hazlitt "walked about, unwashed, unshaved, hardly sober...
...awaited me below." After months of fruitless wooing, Hazlitt learned that the landlord's daughter loved another man. He asked her to describe her lover. She pointed to a statuette on Hazlitt's mantelpiece. "[He is like] that little image," she said. It was a statuette of Napoleon. Hazlitt hurled the bust to the floor, rushed from the house crying: "She has destroyed me forever...
After that Hazlitt devoted himself to Napoleon. "Ghastly, shrunk and helpless," his voice reduced to a "hoarse whistle," Hazlitt ground out a four-volume life of his hero which is now forgotten. Wrote the disillusioned biographer: "I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and practical malignity of man. . . . Hatred alone is immortal...