And if none of these three operations is practicable, I see nothing else for it but to conclude peace with England." The greater part of his career serves as a commentary on these designs.

To one or other of them he was constantly turning as alternative schemes for the subjugation of his most redoubtable foe.
The first plan he now judged to be impracticable; the second, which appears later in its fully matured form as his Continental System, was not for the present feasible, because France was about to settle German affairs at the Congress of Rastadt; to the third he therefore turned the whole force of his genius.
The conquest of Egypt and the restoration to France of her supremacy in India appealed to both sides of Bonaparte's nature.

The vision of the tricolour floating above the minarets of Cairo and the palace of the Great Mogul at Delhi fascinated a mind in which the mysticism of the south was curiously blent with the practicality and passion for details that characterize the northern races.

To very few men in the world's history has it been granted to dream grandiose dreams and all but realize them, to use by turns the telescope and the microscope of political survey, to plan vast combinations of force, and yet to supervise with infinite care the adjustment of every adjunct.

Caesar, in the old world, was possibly the mental peer of Bonaparte in this majestic equipoise of the imaginative and practical qualities; but of Caesar we know comparatively little; whereas the complex workings of the greatest mind of the modern world stand revealed in that storehouse of facts and fancies, the "Correspondance de Napoleon." The motives which led to the Eastern Expedition are there unfolded.