Blackwell Reference Online

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Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo. Which proves how fools may have their fortune too Won, half by blunder, half by treachery; Oh, dull Saint Helen! with thy jailer nigh - Hear! hear! Prometheus from his rock appeal To earth, air, ocean, all that felt or feel His power and glory, all who yet shall hear A name eternal as the rolling year; … A single step into the wrong has given His name a doubt to all the winds of heaven; The reed of Fortune, and of thrones the rod, Of Fame the Moloch or the demigod; His country's Caesar, Europe's Hannibal, Without their decent dignity of fall. On 18 June 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte, the so-called ‘scourge of Europe’, was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. Initial reactions to the Allied victory were divided. As Tory bards prepared to eulogise the heroic Wellington, younger liberal writers were openly unsure about their feelings. Whether Napoleon was seen as the betrayer of revolutionary ideals or as the apotheosis of high Romantic identity, his commanding presence had made a difference. The tragically inclined Lord Byron received the loss as a personal blow. The radicals Hazlitt, Thelwall and Godwin were reportedly stunned. Even the unsympathetic Shelley, who had described the Emperor as a ‘tyrant’, a ‘slave’ who ‘danc[ed] and revel[ed] on the grave / Of Liberty’, could yet admit that with his defeat, that ‘master theme of the epoch in ... log in or subscribe to read full text