Such was the setting of the stage in the great national theater of France when Napoleon Buonaparte entered on the scene. The records of his boyhood and youth by his own hand afford the proof of what he was at twenty-four. It has required no searching analysis to discern the man, nor trace the influences of his education. Except for short and unimportant periods, the story is complete and accurate. It is, moreover, absolutely unsophisticated. What does it show? A well-born Corsican child, of a family with some fortune, glad to use every resource of a disordered time for securing education and money, patriotic at heart but willing to profit from France, or indeed from Russia, England, the Orient; wherever material advantage was to be found. This boy was both idealist and realist, each in the high degree corresponding to his great abilities. He shone neither as a scholar nor as an officer, being obdurate to all training,--but by independent exertions and desultory reading of a high class he formed an ideal of society in which there prevailed equality of station and purse, purity of life and manners, religion without clericalism, free speech and honorable administration of just laws. His native land untrammeled by French control would realize this ideal, he had fondly hoped: but the Revolution emancipated it completely, entirely; and what occurred? A reversion to every vicious practice of medievalism, he himself being sucked into the vortex and degraded into a common adventurer. Disenchanted and bitter, he then turned to France. Abandoning his double rôle, his interest in Corsica was thenceforth sentimental; his fine faculties when focused on the realities of a great world suddenly exhibit themselves in keen observation, fair conclusions, a more than academic interest, and a skill in the conduct of life hitherto obscured by unfavorable conditions. Already he had found play for all his powers both with gun and pen. He was not only eager but ready to deploy them in a higher service.