M. de la Gravière, to his credit, had not followed the usual "perfide Albion" style of the French journalists, nor exhibited that jesuitical evasion of fact, and the perpetual peevishness against England, which marks and disgraces French history. He never sinks English success into failure, or inflates French failure into victory. He writes with the calmness of a man in search of the truth; judges with every visible _intention_ of impartiality; examines the private documents of the transactions; and pronounces a judgment which, though obviously and essentially _French_, is perhaps as honest an effort in pursuit of the reality of things, as is compatible with the nature of our clever and lively libellers on the other side of the Channel. Those volumes begin by some striking remarks of Napoleon at St Helena. This extraordinary man never spoke of his defeat at Acre in 1799 but with bitter regret. He declared that it was his intention, had he taken that fortress, to have marched to Constantinople at the head of the tribes of Mount Lebanon, or to have followed the steps of Alexander to the Indus. His repulse from Acre, he always said, "marred his destiny." All this verbiage of the great Captain, however, has been sufficiently exposed by the actual event. He could no more have marched to Constantinople than he could have marched to the Indus, nor have marched to the Indus more than he could have marched to the Pole star. With but 40,000 men, (the whole number which landed in Egypt,) it would have been utterly impossible for him to have carried a force through Syria and Asia Minor equal to the attack on Constantinople--even if the Russians were not _at hand_. The march to the Indus would have lain through the deserts of Arabia and Persia, and have stripped him down to a corporal's guard before he had got half-way. A French foot would never have been dipt in that far-famed river, which is now a British Canal. The tribes of Lebanon would no more have recruited his ranks, than they would have given him their sequins. His destiny lay in another direction. No man knew this better; and doubtless he rejoiced, when he found himself on board the frigate carrying him westward, and relieving him of the "glory" of being slaughtered by the Arabs, and embalmed by the sands.