Peter's personal appearance was commanding; he was tall, stout, and well formed; his features were regular, rather severe, but indicative of great energy of character. He was forced into a marriage at seventeen, and had one son by the Czarina; but his wife, having encouraged the factious party, was divorced, and confined in a convent, after she had been married nine years. His second wife, Catherine, was an obscure girl, whom he saw among the prisoners at Marienburg, and who, after being the mistress of Mensitzoff, became that of the Czar; and having gained his affections she was privately married to him, and afterwards, in 1711, acknowledged as Czarina and his lawful wife. She survived the Czar, who died in 1725, only two years. The character of Peter the Great, notwithstanding his gigantic endeavours to advance the prosperity of his empire, was stained with many vices. He frequently swayed his people with a rod of iron, and displayed a deficiency of knowledge of the world, and sound practical understanding, in his eagerness to forward civilization. To borrow the words of Mr. Barrow, "In the ardour of alteration and improvement he indiscriminately adopted a thousand foreign customs and institutions, without regarding time, place, propriety, or circumstance; instead of forming his people upon originality, he moulded them into imitators, and injudiciously deprived them of their ancient character, without ascertaining the practicability of giving them a better."-A. T. THOMSON. 1. The title of the Emperor of Russia, supposed to be a corruption from Cæsar. PETER THE GREAT. WHAT cannot active government perform, New-moulding man? Wide-stretching from these shores, A huge neglected empire-one vast mind, By Heaven inspired, from Gothic darkness called, He His stubborn country tamed, her rocks, her fens, Her floods, her seas, her ill-submitting sons; The wonder done! behold the matchless prince Who greatly spurned the slothful pomp of courts; Charged with the stores of Europe, home he goes! And awing there stern Othman's shrinking sons. THOMSON'S'Seasons.' NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 15th August 1769. The Duke of Wellington was born in the same month.1 "Providence," said Louis XVIII., "owed us that counterpoise." His family, though noble, had not been distinguished, and had suffered severely from misfortune. He was too great a man to attempt to derive distinction from any adventitious advantages which did not really belong to him, and could afford to discard all the lustre of patrician descent. When the Emperor of Austria endeavoured, after he became his son-in-law, to trace his connection with some of the obscure dukes of Treviso, he answered that he was the Rudolph of Hapsburg of his family: and when the genealogists were engaged in deducing his descent from an ancient line of Gothic princes, he cut short their labours by declaring that his patent of nobility dated from the battle of Montenotte. His mother, who was distinguished by great beauty, and no common firmness and intrepidity of mind, shared in the fatigues and dangers of her husband during the civil dissensions which distracted the island at the time of his birth, and had recently before been engaged in some expeditions on horseback with him. His father died at the age of thirty-eight, of a cancer in the stomach, a complaint hereditary in his family, and which also proved fatal to Napoleon himself; but the want of paternal care was more than supplied by his mother, to whose early education and solicitude he, in after life, mainly ascribed his elevation. Though left a widow in the prime of life, she had already borne thirteen children of whom five sons and three daughters survived their father. She lived to see one of them wearing the crown of Charlemagne, and another seated on the throne of Charles V. In the years of infancy Napoleon exhibited nothing remarkable, ̧ excepting irritability and turbulence of temper; but these qualities, as well as the decision with which they were accompanied, were so powerful that they gave him the entire command of his eldest brother Joseph, a boy of a mild and unassuming character, who was constantly beaten, pinched, or tormented by the future ruler of the world. But even at that early period it was observed that he never wept when chastised: and on one occasion, when he was only seven years of age, having been suspected unjustly of a fault, and punished when innocent, he endured the pain, and subsisted in disgrace for three days upon the coarsest food, rather than betray his companion, who was really in fault. Though his anger was violent, it was generally of short endurance, and his smile from the first was like a beam of the sun emerging from the clouds. But, nevertheless, he gave no indications of extraordinary capacity at that early age; and his mother was frequently heard to declare that, of all her children, he was the one whom she would have least expected to have attained an extraordinary eminence. The winter residence of his father was generally at Ajaccio, the place of his birth, where there is still preserved the model of a cannon, weighing about thirty pounds, the early plaything of Napoleon. But in summer the family retired to a dilapidated villa near the isle of Sanguiniere, once the residence of a relation of his mother's, situated in a romantic spot on the sea-shore. The house is approached by an avenue, overhung by the cactus and acacia, and other shrubs which grow luxuriantly in a southern climate, It has a garden and a lawn, showing vestiges of neglected beauty, and surrounded by a shrubbery permitted to run to wilderness. There, enclosed by the cactus, the clematis, and the wild olive, is a singular and isolated granite rock, beneath which the remains of a small summer-house are still visible, the entrance to which is nearly closed by a luxuriant fig-tree. This was the favourite retreat of the young Napoleon, who early showed a love of solitary meditation, during the periods when the vacations at school permitted him to return home. We might suppose that there were perhaps formed those visions of ambition and high resolves, for which the limits of the world were ere long felt to be insufficient, did we not know that childhood can hardly anticipate the destiny of maturer years; and that, in Cromwell's words, a man never rises so high as when he does not know where his course is to terminate.-ALISON's History of Europe.' 1 It is somewhat remarkable, and reminds one of the story told by Sir Walter Raleigh about the row under the Tower, that the birthday of both Wellington and Napoleon should be matter of dispute. So it is, however. Dr. DURING the 3rd of May, it was seen that the life of Napoleon was drawing evidently to a close; and his followers, and particularly his physician, became desirous to call in more medical assistance, that of Dr. Shortt, physician to the forces, and of Dr. Mitchell, surgeon of the flag-ship, was referred to. Shortt, however, thought it proper to assert the dignity belonging to his profession, and refused (being under the same roof with the patient) to give an opinion on a case of so much importance in itself, and attended with so much obscurity, unless he were permitted to see and examine him. The officers of Napoleon's household excused themselves by professing that the Emperor's strict commands had been laid on them, that no English physician, Dr. Arnott excepted, should approach his dying bed. They said, that even when he was speechless they would be unable to brook his eye, should he turn it upon them in reproof for their disobedience. About two o'clock of the same day, the priest Vignali administered the sacrament of extreme unction. Some days before, Napoleon had explained to him the manner in which he desired his body should be laid out in state, in an apartment' lighted by torches, or what Catholics call "une chambre ardente." "I am neither,' he said, in the same phrase which we have formerly quoted, "a philosopher nor a physician. I believe in God, and am of the religion of my father. It is not everybody who can be an atheist. I was born a Catholic, and will fulfil all the duties of the Catholic Church, and receive the assistance which it administers." He then turned to Dr. Antommarchi, whom he seems to have suspected of heterodoxy, which the doctor, however disowned. "How can you carry it so far?" he said. "Can you not believe in God whose existence everything proclaims, and in whom the greatest minds have believed?" As if to mark a closing point of resemblance betwixt Cromwell and Napoleon, a dreadful tempest arose on the 4th of May, which preceded the day that was to close the mortal existence of this extraordinary man. A willow, which had been the exile's favourite, and under which he often enjoyed the fresh breeze, was torn up by the hurricane; and almost all the trees about Longwood shared the same fate. The 5th of May came amid wind and rain. Napoleon's passing spirit was deliriously engaged in a strife more terrible than that of the elements around. The words "tête d'armée," the last which escaped his lips, intimated that his thoughts were watching the current of a heady fight. About eleven minutes before six in the evening, Napoleon, after a struggle which indicated the original strength of his constitution, breathed his last.-SCOTT's 'Life of Napoleon.' 1. That is, "a room artificially lighted." | the army;" that is, the Commander-in2. "The head of the army" corre- chief, and his principal officers. sponding with our phrase the "Staff of THIS is the great and inappreciable' glory of England in this portion of its history, that its war in the Peninsula was in as strict conformity with the highest principles of justice as with sound state policy. No views of aggrandizement were entertained either at its commencement or during its course, or at its termination; conquests were not looked for, commercial privileges were not required. It was a defensive, a necessary, a retributive war; engaged in as the best means of obtaining security for ourselves, but having also for its immediate object "to loose the bands of wickedness," and to break the yoke of oppression, and "to let the oppressed go free." And this great deliverance was brought about by England, with God's blessing on a righteous cause. If France has not |