jesty, and spoken of as such in all public journals.* So much for courtesy. This is our case ;—if the Editor thinks he has a better, we neither envy him his logic, his law, nor his feelings.

Vide Piedmontese Gazettes for December, 1823; also the French Moniteur for January, 1824.

CHAP. XVII.

SELFISHNESS OF NAPOLEON.

"BUONAPARTE was the most selfish creature that ever lived; self was his god; he sacrificed the lives of millions with total unconcern; and as to the death of particular individuals attached to him, it passed by him like the idle wind. When the end of Murat was announced, he listened to the recital without any change of countenance."-New Times, Sept., 1822.

Is there a light in which the conduct of Napoleon can be made to appear hideous that the Editor of the New Times does not instantly avail himself of to beat down and overwhelm the character of him who so lately swayed the destinies of the world? Napoleon was selfish,-he had no feeling, -he was insensible; and this is given to us as information, and matter too for condemnation. "The mountain in labour!" He who, from the first dawn to the close of his existence, was contending for empire and renown, was lost to the finer sympathies, and absorbed in self, thought and thought only of his own interest and advancement; assuredly, and we can only wonder how

the Editor could imagine any other result from Napoleon's life possible. War is by no means an amiable drawing-room pastime, and that man who is most engaged in it, is most likely to become an egotist and a brute. In the utter disregard of one's neighbour,-in the pleasure taken even in the misery of one's friends, all armies are alike; and, before offering another word in extenuation of Napoleon, we will illustrate this opinion by a few particulars, descriptive of the natural tendency which pervades soldiers when collected in large bodies. Our first example shall be from ancient history, and we will afterwards proceed, not to occupy more than is necessary of the readers' time, to the annals of the days in which we live:

At the siege of Syracuse by the Athenians (A. C. 413), under Nicias and Demosthenes, about 40,000 men had to retreat from before the city; this force was divided into two columns, the smaller division being led by Demosthenes, the larger one by Nicias, and it is of this last we shall speak. Driven by the victorious Sicilians to the border of the Assinaros River, the dejected Athenians had the difficult task presented to them of crossing a rapid stream in presence of an active enemy. "The depth and force of the waters triumphed over their single, and shook their implicated strength. Many were borne along by the

current; at length the weight of their numbers resisted the violence of the torrent; but a new form of danger and of horror presented itself to the eyes of Nicias-his soldiers turned their fury against each other, disputing, at the point of the sword, the unwholesome draughts of the agitated and turbid river. This spectacle melted the firmness of his manly soul; he surrendered to Gylippus, and asked quarter for the miserable remnant of his troops who had not perished on the Assinaros, or been destroyed by the Syracusan archers and cavalry*."

"I will detail here my first anecdote respecting the plague, because it was at Tentoura that I witnessed this disease in its worse state. From the hospitals of Kerdanoné and Mount Carmel, the sick and wounded were sent to Tentoura, from which place they were conveyed in small vessels to Jaffa, and thence to Damietta (1799). There remained in the huts on the sea-shore a few wretches who waited to be removed. Amongst them was a soldier afflicted with the plague, who in the delirium which mostly accompanies it, imagined, on perceiving the army in motion, that he was about being abandoned. His mind at once portrayed to him the frightful extent of his misfortune; and the horror of falling into the

*History of Ancient Greece; John Gillies, LLD.: vol. 2, p. 409. (Thucydid. p. 554, 5.) 、

hands of the Arabs so strongly affected his feelings, that he attempted following the troops on foot. Seizing for this purpose his knapsack, on which his head had rested, he threw it over his shoulders, and made an effort to walk; but the venom of the fatal disease which circulated in his veins, deprived him of all strength; and, after two or three paces, he fell headlong on the sand. The accident did but augment his fears. After gazing for some seconds at the divisions of the army in march, he rose a second time, but with no better success. At the third effort he sunk down, near the water's edge, to rise no more, and became rivetted to the spot which fate had destined him for a tomb. The sight of this man was dreadful in the extreme. The incoherency of his language, the state of cruel suffering under which his whole frame laboured, his eyes starting from their sockets, -his wild stare,—and his garments in tatters,-presented altogether the picture of whatever in death strikes us as most appalling. The reader will perhaps imagine here, that this poor soldier's comrades stopped to help him, and support his tottering steps:-no such thing. On the contrary, he was only an object of disgust and derision to them. They shrunk from him as from the blast of the desert, and laughed heartily at his reeling motions, which resembled those of a drunken person. He has got