since the great success in England of the former editions of these
Memoirs, and the high reputation they have acquired on the European
Continent, and in every part of the civilised world where the fame of
Bonaparte has ever reached, sufficiently establish the merits of M. de
Bourrienne as a biographer. These merits seem to us to consist chiefly
in an anxious desire to be impartial, to point out the defects as well as
the merits of a most wonderful man; and in a peculiarly graphic power of
relating facts and anecdotes. With this happy faculty Bourrienne would
have made the life of almost any active individual interesting; but the
subject of which the most favourable circumstances permitted him to treat
was full of events and of the most extraordinary facts. The hero of his
story was such a being as the world has produced only on the rarest
occasions, and the complete counterpart to whom has, probably, never
existed; for there are broad shades of difference between Napoleon and
Alexander, Caesar, and Charlemagne; neither will modern history furnish
more exact parallels, since Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick the Great,
Cromwell, Washington, or Bolivar bear but a small resemblance to
Bonaparte either in character, fortune, or extent of enterprise. For
fourteen years, to say nothing of his projects in the East, the history
of Bonaparte was the history of all Europe!

With the copious materials he possessed, M. de Bourrienne has produced a
work which, for deep interest, excitement, and amusement, can scarcely be
paralleled by any of the numerous and excellent memoirs for which the
literature of France is so justly celebrated.

M. de Bourrienne shows us the hero of Marengo and Austerlitz in his
night-gown and slippers--with a 'trait de plume' he, in a hundred
instances, places the real man before us, with all his personal habits
and peculiarities of manner, temper, and conversation.