Lieutenant Bonaparte accomplished his second step in the only path where such a power could be profitably available; he having in that year obtained a captain's commission, by priority, in the regiment of Grenoble. Promotion and patriotism, it is grievous to be obliged to add, agreed ill with each other, and, as usual, the weaker power gave way in the struggle.

The Convention placed a large reward upon the now aged and venerable Paoli's head, who was defending his country as zealously against Robespierre's myrmidons as he did against the armies of Louis XVI.; and Captain Bonaparte, in the interest of democracy, and liberty, of course they were his polar stars-fought against Paoli and Corsica! Admiral Truguet landed a large force upon the island, and Captain Bonaparte was despatched from Bastia, with orders if possible to surprise Ajaccio, his native city. He landed a portion of his forces in the Gulf, from the frigate placed at his service, captured the Torre de Capitello, nearly facing the town; but, being immediately invested by the Corsican forces, he was compelled to re-embark with precipitation upon the return of the frigate, after having blown up the Torre de Capitello. Shortly after this the Bonaparte family were banished from Corsica, and the mother of Napoleon, with two of her daughters, took refuge at Marseilles.

Not long afterwards Fate summoned Napoleon Bonaparte to Toulon, and there caught him in the resistless tide by which he was floated, whirled on to empire and to exile. In these pages we do not accompany him thither, and have only to remark, in conclusion, how very singularly, ominously, the youth of this extraordinary man prefigures, not, perhaps, the catastrophe, but, at all events, the views and purposes of his life; and the means-Force! Fear!--by which he alone sought their accomplishment. The glory and grandeur of France, it is clearly manifest, only grew precious in his eyes when they became synonymous with his own; and even the national vanity, which he regarded as a prime element of Force, was carefully cultivated but in one direction that which tended to swell his own pride.

"The cries of the dying," he exclaims, in his letter to General Paoli, "the groans of the oppressed, the tears of despair, were the companions of my infancy." Ay, and history will be compelled to add, the remorseless multiplication of those cries, those groans, those tears, was the chief occupation, and constituted what men call the glory of his manhood. Much more might be said, did not the long agony of St. Helena, borne with no more fortitude than the school-boy penance at Brienne, sorrowfully entreat silence, and awaken in the coldest breast a compassionate sympathy for the fallen Emperor, which it may be doubted if he ever felt for one human being-save himself. "Posterity will do me justice!" was his frequent exclamation, as the night of Death gradually overgrew and darkened the sad gloom of captivityPosterity will do me justice!" There can be no question but it will; neither, spite of ephemeral appearances to the contrary, is there any doubt that the posterity which will pronounce that final and irreversible decree of justice is very near at hand.

It may be as well to mention that no document quoted in this paper has been derived from the wonderful contents of the sealed box which so wonderfully came to light some dozen years ago, containing numberless manuscripts and note-books, written by the deceased Emperor when a lieutenant of artillery, which showed that he had contrived to master every kind of knowledge-with the exception of grammar and orthography-and every variety of composition, epic, historic, romantic, pastoral, critical, scientific, and statistic. One of the geographical common-place books concludes with an unfinished, and certainly very remarkable sentence in Lieutenant Bonaparte's own hand, thus:"Sainte Hélène, petite ileTo which had there been added, je mourrai le 6 Mai, 1821," the fabrication would not have been one whit more palpable or more audacious.

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ПHE circumstances attendant upon the birth of this illustrious soldier, on the 1st of May, 1769, at Dangan Castle, county of Meath, Ireland, at which date, and where, there can be no reasonable doubt, notwithstanding certain plausibilities to the contrary, the Duke of Wellington was born, were hardly of a nature to suggest that a very brilliant future awaited the newly-arrived stranger. The castle, a roughly-built, poorly-furnished stronghold of a previous and much ruder age, belonged only nominally to the child's father, Garret, the second Earl of Mornington, who had long since encumbered the family estates, not very extensive when they came into his possession, beyond all reasonable hope of extrication; the title, which in this country stands a young man in excellent stead of a fortune, by enabling him to wed one, was already bespoken by Richard Wellesley, or Wesley, as the name was then written, a healthy elder brother; and even the snug little borough of Trim, a constitutional heirloom of the family's, which might be turned to good account in the Irish parliamentary market, would of course also fall to the lot of the said Richard, till the demise of his father called him to the Upper House. The military profession, that unfailing resource in happier times of the younger branches of noble families, moreover, presented just then an extremely doleful prospect, it being the almost universal conviction that the glorious peace concluded some six years previously had closed the Temple of War for a century to come at least. In truth, if we look at the actual circumstances of the time, at the apparent condition of the world in the hero-producing year 1769, it will be seen that the confident predictions of the peace-prophets of that day were, upon the whole, very reasonably based. The English States of America, relieved

of their dangerous and exasperating presence of their long-time pugnacious neighbours, the French, were still brimful of loyalty to the parent country, whose arms had mainly brought about that desirable consummation. France was dancing, singing, boasting, bowing, with her usual vivacity, grace, and sprightliness, beneath the time-consecrated régime of the elder Bourbons; the successes of Clive had dissipated the peril which at one time appeared to menace the peaceful pursuits and modest establishments of English merchants trading to India; the '45, experience clearly proved, had finally disposed of the Stuart dynastic danger,-in short, it was manifest to everybody except a few rusty-brained, old-world fanatics, that the elements of international hatred and strife which had so long clouded the political horizon were dispersed, or in rapid process of becoming so, and the long pined-for day of universal brotherhood and peace, in which men should beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning-hooks, and not learn war any more, was at length dawning upon mankind with brightest promise. The future of this child, this Arthur Wellesley, therefore, would appear to have been somewhat of the dismalest, unless, indeed, he should prove of a serious turn of mind, in which case Trim might perhaps help him to a rectory, with a bishopric within approachable distance. Not long, alas! did the wisdom of men and ministers permit the philanthropic dreamers of the world to indulge in the beatific visions they had conjured up. Arthur Wellesley had but just passed his sixth birth-day when the echoes of Bunker's Hill came booming over the Atlantic, to proclaim that an unjustly-attempted impost of threepence per pound upon tea had sufficed to rekindle the fires of national strife, and create new opportunities for the exercise and sustenance of that military chivalry which a great orator has assured us is not only the cheap defence of nations-a quite debateable propositionbut the nurse of every manly sentiment and heroic enterprise. A French poet says, Napoleon Bonaparte leapt exultingly in his mother's womb at the sound of the cannon which proclaimed the annexation of Corsica to France. If this be true, it is plain that, supposing Arthur Wellesley to have been gifted ever so inferiorly to his great rival with prophetic sympathy, the Plantagenet blood flowing in his veins must have been instantly kindled to a flame as the preluding signal of the giant strife it was his destiny to wrestle down, (it was the flaming brand caught from the American conflagration which exploded mined and volcanic France,) pealed over the waters from the western hemisphere ! At all events we know, that about this time, Lord and Lady Mornington arrived at the satisfactory conclusion that the military profession was not, after all, such a hopeless one as it had been represented, and that a pair of epaulettes would consequently be a sufficient as well as an easily obtainable provision for lithe, combative, plain,-Lady Mornington's accustomed expression was a more decided one,-little Arthur.

The blood of the Plantagenets is at any rate no fiction, whether informed by prophetic instinct or not, as gentlemen versed in genealogies, and who it should seem do not think the greatness achieved by the stern, sagacious, heroic warrior, sufficient for his glory, unless gilded by

the prestige of royalty, have distinctly proved. They demonstrate the Duke of Wellington to be a blood-relative,—a distant one, no doubt, of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria,-by descent from King Edward I., surnamed Longshanks. The evidence appears satisfactory, and further, that the intermediate links of the long chain of light descending down are almost all Irish. They hold together as follows:-Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, youngest child of Edward I., became Countess of Hereford, and her daughter married the first Earl of Ormonde: the eighth Earl of Ormonde's daughter, Helen Butler, espoused Donogh, second Earl of Thomond, and had issue, Lady Margaret O'Brien, who became the wife of Dermod, Lord Inchiquin; the Honourable Mary O'Brien, daughter of the fifth Lord Inchiquin, married Michael Boyle, Archbishop of Armagh, and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, by whom she had a daughter, Eleanor Boyle, who married the Right Honourable William Hill, M.P., and was grandmother of Anthony Hill, first Viscount Dungannon, whose daughter Anne, Countess of Mornington, was the mother of Arthur, Duke of Wellington!

The Saxon lineage of the great Duke shows poorly by the side of this Hibernian ancestral roll, and, worse than all, cannot be clearly traced beyond the Colleys or Cowleys of Rutlandshire, of whom two brothers, Robert and Walter Colley or Cowley, migrated to the county Kilkenny, in the reign of Henry VIII. Those clever gentlemen first managed to secure the clerkship of the Crown for their joint lives, and subsequently Robert obtained the Mastership of the Rolls, and Walter the office of Solicitor-general. A descendant of these astute lawyers succeeded by will to the property of the Wellesleys or Wesleys of Dangan Castle, with which family the Cowleys were previously connected by marriage, assumed their name, and was created by George II., Earl of Mornington. As if to bring the comparative shabbiness of the English line into more prominent relief, an enthusiastic delver amidst collateral issues turned up Colley Cibber, whom he calls "the eminent dramatist and poet," amongst the Rutlandshire Colleys, and forthwith despatched the gratifying intelligence to the newspapers, that Colley Cibber, the hero of the "Dunciad," and "Poet," who communicated an odour to the laureate wreath which it will require many Wordsworths and Tennysons thoroughly to dispel, was ancestrally associated with the Duke of Wellington and Prince of Waterloo! The Duke's own opinion of the value of all or any such industrious researches in his honour, would probably have been pretty much the same as that expressed by Napoleon Bonaparte's brusque reproof of the Austrian genealogists, who had suddenly made the important discovery that the proposed son-in-law of their emperor was descended from Rodolph of Hapsburgh, through some of the princes of Treviso-"Bah!" exclaimed Napoleon, "my patent of nobility dates from the battle of Monte Notte!"

Passing from heraldic speculations to sober biographic verity, we find that the Duke's immediate progenitors, the first and second Earls of Mornington, were both distinguished for musical ability. His grandfather, the first earl, played the violin admirably; and the son, his grace's father, not only attained very early proficiency upon the same