conversation of men of science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet;
but the men of letters he slighted; "they were manufacturers of
phrases." Of medicine, too, he was fond of talking, and with those of
its practitioners whom he most esteemed,-with Corvisart at Paris, and
with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. "Believe me, "he said to the last,
"we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress which
neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way
of its defense? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of
your laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me, that all your
filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of
uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are
more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air, and cleanliness, are
the chief articles in my pharmacopeia."

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud, at St.
Helena, have great value, after all the deduction that, it seems, is
to be made from them, on account of his known disingenuousness. He has
the goodnature of strength and conscious superiority. I admire his
simple, clear narrative of his battles;--good as Caesar's; his
good-natured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser
and his other antagonists, and his own equality as a writer to his
varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either
in the camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius,
directing on abstract questions the native appetite for truth, and the
impatience of words, he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy every
play of invention, a romance, a _bon mot_, as well as a stratagem
in a campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in
a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of a fiction, to which his