to single combat; to which he made answer, that he would not come forth to a duel unless the English could fetch Marlborough from his grave, but that, in the meantime, any one of his grenadiers would willingly give the challenger such satisfaction as he was entitled to demand.  Whatever inaccuracy there may be in some of these circumstances, there is no doubt of the fact that Buonaparte and the brave commodore strove together at Acre, under the highest influence of personal resentment, as well as martial skill and determination.

[21st May.] The siege had now lasted sixty days.  Once more Napoleon commanded an assault, and his officers and soldiery once more obeyed him with devoted and fruitless gallantry.  The loss his army had by this time undergone was very great.  Caffarelli and many other officers of the highest importance were no more.  The plague had some time before this appeared in the camp; every day the ranks of his legions were thinned by this pestilence, as well as by the weapons of the defenders of Acre.  The hearts of all men were quickly sinking.  The Turkish fleet was at hand to reinforce Djezzar; and upon the utter failure of the attack of the 21st of May, Napoleon yielded to stern necessity, and began his retreat upon Jaffa.

The plague now raged in the army.  The very name of this horrible scourge shook the nerves of the Europeans; its symptoms filled them with indescribable horror.  The sick despaired utterly; the healthy trembled to minister to them in their misery.  Napoleon went through the hospitals, and at once breathed hope into the sufferers, and rebuked the cowardice of their attendants, by squeezing and relieving with his own hand the foul ulcers which no one had dared to touch.  Pity that this act of true heroism must ever be recorded on the same page that tells the story of the sand-hills!

The name of Jaffa was already sufficiently stained; but fame speedily represented Napoleon as having now made it the scene of another atrocity, not less shocking than that of the massacre of the Turkish prisoners.

The accusation, which for many years made so much noise throughout Europe, amounts to this:  that on the 27th of May, when it was necessary for Napoleon to pursue his march from Jaffa for Egypt, a certain number of the plague-patients in the hospital were found to be in a state that held out no hope whatever of their recovery; that the general, being unwilling to leave them to the tender mercies of the Turks, conceived the notion of administering opium, and so procuring for them at least a speedy and an easy death; and that a number of men were accordingly taken off in this method by his command.  The story, the circumstances of which were much varied in different accounts, especially as regards the numbers of the poisoned (raised sometimes as high as 500), was first disseminated by Sir Robert Wilson, and was in substance generally believed in England.  In each and all of its parts, on the contrary, it was wholly denied by the admirers of Buonaparte, who treated it as one of the many gross falsehoods, which certainly were circulated touching the personal character and conduct of their idol, during the continuance of his power.