comfort and cleanliness, as effeminate; in my dress, so far as I was able, I imitated the plainness of the consular garb which Bonaparte, according to Corry, most affected to wear.

When I had saved money enough I bought a copy of Plutarch's Lives, a volume of which Napoleon carried in his pocket. Over the great names of antiquity I pondered with fond delight and intense emotion. The characters which most impressed me were those of Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, Hannibal, Anthony, Scipio, Cato, Brutus, Alcibiades, and Themistocles. For Cicero or Demosthenes I had no great affection; they were only men of verbal craft-mere civilians. Oratory, however, was an art I cultivated; but it was of the martial kind, addressed to an assembled army on the eve of battle, or to fugitive and dispirited battalions, and in which I mostly practised from elevated points or in the depths of mines or quarries. All the remarkable sayings, maxims, and apophthegms of the ancient heroes I treasured up, and endeavoured as much as possible to emulate their sententious brevity and peremptoriness. Of course this made me rather unamiable and unsociable; but of the external world I took no heed. My character had become thoroughly Roman; rigid in virtue, inflexible in purpose; silent, proud, imperious, and disdainful. My religion, however, had undergone no change in its general principles, but I had no time to attend to it. My Sundays were spent over Plutarch, Cæsar's Commentaries, or Homer's Iliad, or in the iteration of my gymnastic exploits.

One accomplishment essential to the modern warrior brought me to a stand-still. Bonaparte was a mathematician; without an acquaintance with mathematics I could never hope to be a great commander, engineer, or strategist. I barely understood the first four rules of arithmetic, and to acquire unaided a knowledge of the higher branches pertaining to gunnery, fortification, and tactics was a task of which I had no previous conception. Suitable books, too, were expensive and hard to procure. Obstacles, however, according to my new ethical code, were not to be thought of, but grappled with and surmounted. Unexpectedly, in a circulating library of the town, I met with a copy of Hutton's Course of Mathematics, intended for the use of cadets of the Royal Military Academy. This was just the work I required. I borrowed it for a week, thinking that would suffice; but at the end of the week I was not quite clear of long division. I borrowed it for another, and again and again renewed it, still I was groping my way in decimals or permutation; and six weeks or two months found me only, in arithmetical series, trying to estimate the contents of gabions and of triangular and rhomboidal piles of shells and cannon-balls. Mean

while a formidable account had been accumulating against me at the library: the librarian was a mathematician, which I suppose was the reason he had the work in his possession, but so reserved I could never extract any information from him. He kept, however, strict account, noting carefully the number of weeks the Course had been forborne, the fines and double fines incurred, and the amount of arrears at compound interest. Hero as I was, my spirit began to quail at the impending prospect of pecuniary embarrassment. I craved a parley, and after some negotiation it was settled that I should pay a certain amount of composition for use, and next buy the work out, which I did. I have still the copy in my possession, with the price in the cover in pencil, as fresh as when inscribed by the late Mr. Bell.

I now set to my task with more deliberation. Arithmetic was mastered; algebra, logarithms, geometry, trigonometry, surveying, conic sections, the laws of motion, projectiles, &c. up to fluxions were all gone through seriatim. In my progress I sought aid from other sources-from the works of Vince, Saunderson, Fenning, Maclaurin, and articles in encyclopædias. It was a labour of years, two or three at the least, during which it was all mathematics, morn, noon, and night. I became enamoured of the pursuit, and carried it beyond the needful requirements of my intended profession. My mode of study was peculiar, and very different, I suspect, from that pursued in schools and colleges. I made no diagrams, and rarely worked out a question. My attention was limited to a clear apprehension of the rules and examples, and I seldom left a problem or theorem till I had thoroughly mastered it and perceived how it might be done; till I had fairly arrived, by following the successive steps of the demonstration, at the Q. E. D., and clearly saw that it must be so and could not be otherwise.

My studies were sometimes pursued in the warehouse, in intervals of work, but mostly at home, often amidst the noise and uproar of a large family. But nothing could disturb my concentration. By moral resolution, I had hardened myself into a perfect stoical imperturbability to foreign influence; had become a pure intellectual or logical abstraction; a being of determined will and purpose, whom no distraction or blandishment could seduce from the settled object of my devotion.

By industry and perseverance I accumulated a tolerable military library. Among the works I purchased and most valued were Count Turpin's Art of War, Vauban and Coehorn on Fortifications, Marshal Saxe's Reveries, Blundell on Gunnery, with Landmann and others on the attack and defence of places. From these, which I ardently studied, I learnt the best way of making fascines, gabions, crows'-feet, and chevaux-de-frise; of

erecting redoubts, bastions, half-moons, horn-works, crownworks, and the other adjuncts of regularly fortified cities. In these I became so thoroughly grounded, that even now, if I go over a fortified place, I can point out at once the name and use of every part of its defences, and could, I doubt not, give very judicious directions for attack or resistance. The higher branches of the science were not omitted; in the conduct of convoys, in the forming of foraging parties green and dry, and in arranging the details and general plan of a campaign, I became a profound adept. One book particularly rivetted my attention; it was a history of the first campaign of General Bonaparte in Italy. It was a French work, accompanied with a large map of the seat of war, and gave a minute description of his masterly operations, and of the exploits of his brave companions in arms, Massena, Augereau, Provera, and Rampon. I followed it carefully through all its details, weighed well Napoleon's rapid and wonderful tactical combinations, and became as familiar almost as himself with all his movements, and all the local points, rivers, bridges, villages, and positions, on which his failures or successes depended. I did the same with other campaigns of the distinguished French revolutionary commanders; those of our own generals in the Peninsula, and of previous warriors, the great Condé, Prince Eugene, Turenne, Marlborough, Charles XII. and Frederick the Great. The critical and trying junctures of the famous Seven Years' War, in which the philosopher-king shone preeminent in fortitude and resource, and of the gallant chiefs on both sides-Count Daun, Marshal Keith, Ziethen, Loudohn, Brown, and prince Charles of Lorraine-are still familiar to me as household words; neither have escaped me the leading incidents and local positions of the principal sieges and battle-fields of that memorable struggle between one of almost the least, against nearly all the great states of Europe. My studies were incessant, early and late; frequently of a winter's morning I would rise by four or five o'clock, light the fire, and sit down with invincible hardihood to pore over my books, maps, plans, and diagrams. Such vigils at length told on my health; I became very pale and miserably thin; my mother thought I was in a consumption: however, I heeded not; Bonaparte was thin while a student at Brienne; this, with some other manifestations of the outer man in form and proportion, in which I fancied there were resemblances, made me quite satisfied with my personal, convinced that I should be a fac-simile of the hero of Arcole and Lodi !

Here the reader may impatiently exclaim, 'What became of all this martial enthusiasm? I suppose, after distinguishing yourself in the Peninsular war, at Torres Vedras, the battles of

Corunna, Barossa, Salamanca, and Vittoria; in the storming of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, and in driving the rascally French invaders over the Pyrennees, you are now calmly reposing on the laurels won in many a well-fought field, as a retired marshal or general officer, minus a leg, an eye, or arm; honoured by a grand cross, knight companionship, or Waterloo medal, and forming one of the few gallant chiefs who still survive to partake of the annual banquet at Apsley House, in commemoration of the glorious 18th of June?'-Nothing of all this has resulted from my bellicose applications. I am perfectly whole in body; never slew man, woman, or child; never stormed anything much harder than a woolpack or featherbed, and am quite guiltless of a waste of gunpowder, further than in once discharging a pistol at a target, which I missed. How my mania ended I will hereafter explain; it was not through a lunatic asylum, but in a natural, easy, and not unamusing way. First, however, let me wind up my course of self-instruction in the science of war.

An acquaintance with history I esteemed an essential acquirement; as also with the biographies of adventurers and eminent public characters. Of the last, those who had risen amidst revolutionary storms, or by their own energies and deserts, most entertained me. The civil war in England between King Charles and his parliament formed a topic of profound meditation. I admired the characters of Ireton, Bradshaw, Fairfax, and Hampden. Of the debaters and writers, Pym and Prynne, Eliot and Hollis, I do not recollect having taken at this period any particular notice, further than to consider them as tools, which an able chieftain would naturally use as the subservient instruments of his ambition. Oliver Cromwell had my almost undivided love. My phrenzy had risen to such a pitch,―my sanguine hopes had obtained such complete control over my understanding,-that I frequently indulged a vague anticipation that I should one day be able to tread in the Oliverian footsteps, and, after obtaining military command, dexterously pervert my authority to the destruction of the monarchy and the two houses of parliament. The last forms the only portion of my delusions that I can boast of having had practical issues. It is not, however, by the sword, but a smaller instrument, I succeeded. I think I may say that I helped to bring the boroughmongers, their adherents, and supporters to their senses; and, by a long-continued and welldirected fire from a masked battery, urged a legislative assembly to do that which is unusual-reform itself!

It is time, however, for practice: I had mastered the whole theory of warfare, and the period had arrived to enter upon

my career of conquest. The result, or rather no result, of my application to the Horse Guards I shall reserve, as well as my conclusions on the influence of mathematics on the character, and the degree of importance to which they are entitled as a branch of general education. Next I must resume my course of self-instruction in more pacific studies, and show how I glanced off into pure science, philosophy, and literature. I shall only add one reflection, irresistibly forced upon me by experience and observation of the past,-namely, on the very small proportion of all we learn, torment ourselves and toil for, ever becomes available to the proper end and business of our existence-the increase of our felicity. What would have been the best corrective for such a crack-brained enthusiast as myself? Would parental authority, coercively exercised, have been salutary? No; naked force or persecution more frequently tends to confirm than to cure errors and delusions of every description. A little ridicule, accompanied with judicious, repeated, and well-timed representations of the worthless or unattainable nature of the object to which I aspired would have been most salutary. Had this treatment succeeded, three years of energetic life, from I suppose about the fifteenth to my eighteenth or nineteenth year, when I had great opportunities for improvement, would have been more usefully employed, with greater benefit to myself, and perhaps to society.

AGE AND GREATNESS.s. It is only weakness eagerly to seek to live longer than we can live happily and creditably. In the maturity and meridian strength of our being we should reject life on such disparaging terms, and it is one indication of senility to desire it. By age mind and body are partly disqualified for former exertions and enjoyments, and begin gradually to be prepared for dissolution. The examples are almost innumerable of men who began a noble course, but whose early fame has been obscured and deterioriated by too protracted an existence. Without referring to living instances, Dean Swift, Sir Isaac Newton, Marlborough, Lord Erskine, and George III. are familiar illustrations. The most brilliant epoch in the history of Napoleon was the close of his first Italian campaign, when he gave peace to the continent by concluding the treaty of Campo Formio. Subsequently he performed many dazzling exploits-dimmed, however, by accompanying errors and crimes; but after his first triumphs in Italy, and before reaching his thirtieth year, his career exhibited a picture of spotless heroisms-an unsurpassed union of moral and intellectual greatness: and had he then died his character must have descended to posterity as one of almost supernatural grandeur. But he lived too long; long enough to be corrupted by indulgence, success, and despotism, and to experience their wonted and not undeserved retributions. The only exceptional instance that occurs of a man whose greatness began and was perfected after middle life is that of Oliver Cromwell; but Cromwell's greatness was of a peculiar kind-based more on the fatuities of men than their intelligence. I might too, were it not somewhat indelicate to do so, refer to the rare example of a living individual, whom increase of years has elevated from the mere warrior to the patriot and able statesman.