He was temperate in the extreme, seldom allowing himself to take even a glass of wine, and never did he countenance by his presence any scene of bacchanalian revelry. For gaming, in all its branches, he manifested then, and through the whole of his life, the strongest disapproval. He ever refused to repose confidence in any one who was addicted to that vice. One day at St. Helena, he was conversing with Las Casas, when some remark which was made led Napoleon to inquire, "Were you a gamester?" "Alas, sire!" Las Casas replied, "I must confess that I was, but only occasionally." "I am very glad," Napoleon rejoined, "that I knew nothing of it at the time. You would have been ruined in my esteem. A gamester was sure to forfeit my confidence. The moment I heard that a man was addicted to that vice I placed no more confidence in him." From what source did this young soldier imbibe these elevated principles? Licentiousness, irreligion, gambling had been the trinity of revolutionary France--the substitute which rampant infidelity had adopted, for a benignant Father, a pleading Saviour, a sanctifying Spirit. Napoleon was reared in the midst of these demoralizing influences. And yet how unsullied does his character appear when compared with that of his companions in the camp and on the throne! Napoleon informs us that to his mother he was indebted for every pure and noble sentiment which inspired his bosom. Letitia, the mother of Napoleon, was a woman of extraordinary endowments. She had herself hardly passed the period of childhood, being but nineteen years of age, when she heard the first wailing cry of Napoleon, her second born, and pressed the helpless babe, with thanksgiving and prayer, to her maternal bosom. She was a young mother to train and educate such a child for his unknown but exalted destiny. She encircled, in protecting arms, the nursing babe, as it fondled a mother's bosom with those little hands, which, in after years, grasped sceptres, and uphove thrones, and hewed down armies with resistless sword. She taught those infant lips to lisp "papa"--"mamma"--those lips at whose subsequent command all Europe was moved, and whose burning, glowing, martial words fell like trumpet-tones upon the world, hurling nation upon nation in the shock of war. She taught those feeble feet to make their first trembling essays upon the carpet, rewarding the successful endeavor with a mother's kiss and a mother's caress--those feet which afterward strode over the sands of the desert, and waded through the blood-stained snow-drifts of Russia, and tottered, in the infirmities of sickness and death, on the misty, barren, storm-swept crags of St. Helena. She instilled into the bosom of her son those elevated principles of honor and self-respect, which, when surrounded by every temptation earth could present, preserved him from the degraded doom of the inebriate, of the voluptuary, and of the gamester, and which