John when at Rhodes, the expiring
chivalry of Europe gleams fitfully upon us, once more, to provoke a
mortifying comparison with the not yet completed pictures of the capture
of Abd-el-Kader and the last siege of Rome; thence turn to the "Jeu de
Paume," where the ardent figure of Mirabeau represents the genius of the
Revolution, and from it to "Louis XVIII. and the Charter," emblematic of
the Restoration; how shines on this canvas the "helmet of Navarre" in the
"Battle of Ivry," as in Macaulay's spirited lyric, and chastely beautiful
in its stainless marble, stands the heroic Maid of Orleans; while,
appropriately in the midst of these historic characters, we find the bust
of that ideal of picturesque narrators, Froissart. The modern rule of
France is abruptly and almost grotesquely suggested amid such
associations, by the figure of De Joinville on the deck of a man-of-war,
well described by Talfourd, as "the type of dandified, melodramatic
seamanship." The cycles of kingly sway is abruptly broken by the meteoric
episode of Bonaparte: first he appears dispersing the Assembly, and then
in his early victories, wounded at Ratisbon, at the tomb of Frederick the
Great, distributing the Legion of Honor at the Invalides, quelling an
insurrection at Cairo, engaged in his unparalleled succession of battles,
and at the altar with Maria Louisa.
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