The Arena of Verona, above mentioned, is a very ancient and very perfectly preserved amphitheatre in the centre of the town; so old is it, indeed, that no man may say with certainty when it was first erected, although there seems little doubt but that the Romans were the builders of it. The Arena has been the theatre of every imaginable kind of spectacle, savage and solemn and pathetic, from the martyrdoms of early Christians and the gladiatorial combats of Trajan’s day, down through the ages to the bull-fights of Napoleonic times and the last scene of the Austrian domination in Venetia, when the Italian soldiers captured during the battle of Custozza were brought into Verona in the course of the afternoon of June 24, 1866, to be confined in the old amphitheatre. In the month of July, 1805, Napoleon, who was then returning to Paris after his coronation as King of Italy at Milan, arrived at Verona and expressed his wish to witness a bull-fight. Such a spectacle was accordingly organised for his pleasure, and the great man came to preside over the entertainment in the Arena on the afternoon of the 16th of the month—at the very moment when he was straining every nerve, politically speaking, to prepare for an universal European war, and while his fertile brain was completing the details of his projected attack upon the English coast from Boulogne. The account of this bull-fight says that a fine, courageous bull was loosened, and overcame, one after another, the dogs that were set on to it, until Napoleon, carried away by excitement, ordered that two, and then three, dogs should be set on to the bull at once; this number proving insufficient, moreover, the Emperor commanded that all the dogs kept there for purposes of bull-baiting should be let in to attack the bull simultaneously. Needless to add that the unlucky bull was eventually overpowered by its numerous adversaries and that it succumbed beneath their combined attack. It was at this point that one of Napoleon’s general aides-de-camp turned to him, with the laughing suggestion of a warning to be gathered from what had just passed beneath their eyes: namely, the danger of a general hostile alliance of the European Powers, the which it might well be possible for Napoleon to defeat one by one, or even by two or three at a time, but which must as certainly succeed in overcoming him when united by the bond of their common danger. We are not told what answer Napoleon returned to this; but it certainly did not influence him, seeing that he at once set himself to defeating the most formidable of his opponents, Austria, England, and Russia—an undertaking in which the disaster of Trafalgar was well balanced for him by the triumphs of Ulm and Austerlitz.