we translate the anonymous pencil

grasp, and dash the speakers of the clubs down into the dust
with the flashing master-glance of his resistless eye.

That man was Napoleon Buonaparte. He was hardly twenty-nine years of
age, yet already all France was talking him as a hero crowned with
laurels, already had he trodden a brilliant career of victory. As
commander of a battalion he had performed prodigies of valor at the
recapture of Toulon; and then, after being promoted to the rank of
general, had gone to the army in Italy on behalf of the republic.
Bedecked with the laurels of his Italian campaign, the young general of
five-and-twenty had returned to France. There, the government, being
still hostile and ill-disposed toward him, wished to remove him from
Paris, and send him to La Vendee as a brigadier-general. Buonaparte
declined this mission, because he preferred remaining in the artillery
service, and, for that reason, the government of the republic relieved
him of his duties and put him on half-pay.

So, Buonaparte remained in Paris and waited. He waited for the brilliant
star that was soon to climb the firmament for him, and shed the fulness
of its rays over the whole world. Perhaps, the secret voices which
whispered in his breast of a dazzling future, and a fabulous career of
military glory, had already announced the ri


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