Napoleon Bonaparte was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 15th of August, 1769. Corsica is essentially Italian, and to this day a state of society prevails which differs from that of any other part of Europe. The wildest and most deadly feuds are common among its principal families. The people are turbulent and excitable. Napoleon was too great a man to derive distinction from any adventitious advantages, and when the Emperor of Austria, after he became his son-in-law, endeavored to trace his connexion with the obscure Dukes of Treviso, he answered that he was the Rudolph of Hapsburg of his family, and that his patent of nobility dated from the battle of Montenotte. His mother, a woman of no common beauty, being at the festival of the Assumption on the day of his birth, was seized with her pains during high mass. She was brought home and hastily laid upon a couch covered with tapestry representing the heroes of the Iliad, and there the future conqueror was brought into the world. The winter residence of his father was usually at Ajaccio; but in summer the family retired to a villa near the isle of Sanguinere, once the residence of a relation of his mother’s, situated on a romantic spot near the sea shore. The house is approached by an avenue overhung by the cactus, acacia, and other shrubs, which grow luxuriantly in a southern climate. It has a garden and lawn showing vestiges of neglected beauty, and surrounded by a shrubbery permitted to run to a wilderness. There, enclosed by the cactus, the clematis, and the wild olive, is a singular and isolated granite rock, beneath which the remains of a small summer-house are still visible. This was the favorite retreat of young Napoleon, who early showed a love of solitary meditation, during the period when his school vacations permitted him to return home. And it may be supposed, perhaps, that here the magnificence of his oriental imagination formed those visions of ambition and high resolves, for which the limits of the world were, ere long, felt to be insufficient. At an early age he was sent to the military school at Brienne; his character there underwent a rapid alteration; he became thoughtful, studious, and diligent in the extreme.