We are willing enough to believe that the boy Napoleon showed a quite indomitable passion for everything military, and that this born soldier liked nothing so well as to run by the side of the soldiery of Ajaccio. The soldiers had a pleasure in seeing the boy go through the exercise beside them, and many a grayhaired veteran lifted him in his arms and caressed him for imitating the drill so valiantly. He teased his father till he purchased him a cannon, and the toy was long shown in the house of the Bonapartes with which he used to make his mimic battle-thunder, and play the cloud-compelling Jove. He soon began to exercise empire over the youth of Ajaccio, and, like Cyrus with the shepherd-boys of the Medes, and Peter the Great with his play-fellows, he formed the children of Ajaccio into a regiment of soldiers, who bravely took the field against the youngsters of the Borgo of Ajaccio, and fought sanguinary engagements with stones and wooden sabres. In the year 1778, his father took him to the military school of Brienne, where the afterwards celebrated Pichegru was his master. It is known that Napoleon here at first showed himself quiet, gentle, and diligent. His impassioned temperament broke out only occasionally when his delicate sense of honour was touched. His quartermaster one day condemned him for some fault to eat his dinner on his knees in the woollen dress of disgrace, at the door of the refectory. Such a dinner was more than the pride of the young Corsican could stomach; he had an attack of vomiting and a fit. The Père Petrault immediately freed him from the punishment, and made it matter of complaint that his best mathematician was treated so shamefully. In 1783, Napoleon went to the military school of Paris to complete his studies, already a completely-formed character, highly cultivated, glowing with the fires of genius and of youth, his head full of the heroes of his favourite Plutarch, and his heart penetrated with the deeds of his great Corsican forefathers. Society had already begun to ferment, and coming great events threw their shadow forward on the time. It was a period worth living in, heaving with mighty energies, big with change, and full of creative, Titanic impetuosity; it had given Nature the command to prepare great men.