Reminiscences Author:Justin McCarthy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXVII PRINCE NAPOLEON Some years ago, I was dining one day at the house of my friend Fletcher Moulton, and the late Lord Coleridge was one of the c... more »ompany. Some talk began — I think it was Lord Coleridge who set it going — about the manner in which each of us had been impressed by the greatness of some particular man. The conversation grew into a sort of agreement that each of us should say in turn what particular man had most impressed him with the sense of intellectual greatness and force of character. The idea was that, in setting forth our heroes, we were to be free from any consideration of comparative worldly success or even of comparative merit — that each should simply say which man had most impressed him by his intellectual power. I remember thinking at the time of a passage in one of Lord Lytton's novels, where the author declares that no matter what great public men one may have known, each of us mortals is sure to have met someone who had not succeeded in conquering public success, and who yet seemed to him to have a greater intellectual force than any of the world's recognised demigods. I cannot remember the names of all the types of intellect chosen by the individual judgment of each member of our pleasant company : I know that the names of Gladstone and of Bismarck stood at the head of the list, and thatHerbert Spencer and Darwin were not forgotten. Lord Coleridge himself declared that the intellectual force which had most impressed him — and he must have known, I suppose, nearly all the great men of his time — was that of John Henry Newman. For myself, I had the advantage, if it were one, of contributing a name which very much surprised most of the company: the name I gave was that of Prince Napoleon — Napoleon Jerome, the cousin of the Emperor Louis N...« less