cherries together.  One lingers fondly over these scenes of his otherwise stern career, for they reveal his capacity for social joys and for deep and tender affection, had his lot been otherwise cast.  How different might have been his life, had France never conquered Corsica, and had the Revolution never burst forth!  But Corsica was still his dominant passion.  When he was called away from Valence to repress a riot at Lyons, his feelings, distracted for a time by Caroline, swerved back towards his island home; and in September, 1786, he had the joy of revisiting the scenes of his childhood.  Warmly though he greeted his mother, brothers and sisters, after an absence of nearly eight years, his chief delight was in the rocky shores, the verdant dales and mountain heights of Corsica.  The odour of the forests, the setting of the sun in the sea “as in the bosom of the infinite,” the quiet proud independence of the mountaineers themselves, all enchanted him.  His delight reveals almost Wertherian powers of “sensibility.”  Even the family troubles could not damp his ardour.  His father had embarked on questionable speculations, which now threatened the Buonapartes with bankruptcy, unless the French Government proved to be complacent and generous.  With the hope of pressing one of the family claims on the royal exchequer, the second son procured an extension of furlough and sped to Paris.  There at the close of 1787 he spent several weeks, hopefully endeavouring to extract money from the bankrupt Government.  It was a season of disillusionment in more senses than one; for there he saw for himself the seamy side of Parisian life, and drifted for a brief space about the giddy vortex of the Palais Royal.  What a contrast to the limpid life of Corsica was that turbid frothy existence—­already swirling towards its mighty plunge!

After a furlough of twenty-one months he rejoined his regiment, now at Auxonne.  There his health suffered considerably, not only from the miasma of the marshes of the river Saone, but also from family anxieties and arduous literary toils.  To these last it is now needful to refer.  Indeed, the external events of his early life are of value only as they reveal the many-sidedness of his nature and the growth of his mental powers.

How came he to outgrow the insular patriotism of his early years?  The foregoing recital of facts must have already suggested one obvious explanation.  Nature had dowered him so prodigally with diverse gifts, mainly of an imperious order, that he could scarcely have limited his sphere of action to Corsica.  Profoundly as he loved his island, it offered no sphere commensurate with his varied powers and masterful will.  It was no empty vaunt which his father had uttered on his deathbed that his Napoleon would one day overthrow the old monarchies and conquer Europe.[9] Neither did the great commander himself overstate the peculiarity of his temperament, when he confessed that his instincts had ever prompted him that his