nd urges the sending of a liberating force. The
French commissioners agree, and the expedition sails--only to meet
with utter failure. Ajaccio, as one man, repels the partisans of
France; and, a gale of wind springing up, Buonaparte and his men
regain their boats with the utmost difficulty. At a place hard by, he
finds his mother, uncle, brothers and sisters. Madame Buonaparte, with
the extraordinary tenacity of will that characterized her famous son,
had wished to defend her house at Ajaccio against the hostile
populace; but, yielding to the urgent warnings of friends, finally
fled to the nearest place of safety, and left the house to the fury of
the populace, by whom it was nearly wrecked.

For a brief space Buonaparte clung to the hope of regaining Corsica
for the Republic, but now only by the aid of French troops. For the
islanders, stung by the demand of the French Convention that Paoli
should go to Paris, had rallied to the dictator's side; and the aged
chief made overtures to England for alliance. The partisans of France,
now menaced by England's naval power, were in an utterly untenable
position. Even the steel-like will of Buonaparte was bent. His career
in Corsica was at an end for the present; and with his kith and kin he
set sail for France.

The interest of the events above described lies, not in their
intrinsic importance, but in the signal proof which they afford of
Buonaparte's wondrous endowments of mind and will. In a losing cause
and in a petty sphere he displays all the qualities which, when the
omens were favourable, impelled him to the domination of a Continent.
He fights every inch of ground tenaciously; at each emergency he
evinces a truly Italian fertility of resource, gliding round obstacles
or striving to shatter them by sheer audacity, seeing through men,
cajoling them by his insinuations or overawing them by his mental
superiority, ever determined to try the fickle jade Fortune to the
very utmost, and retreating only before the inevitable. The sole
weakness discoverable in this nature, otherwise compact of strength,
is an excess of will-power over all the faculties that make for
prudence. His vivid imagination only serves to fire him with the full
assurance that he must prevail over all obstacles.

And yet, if he had now stopped to weigh well the lessons of the past,
hitherto fertile only in failures and contradictions, he must have
seen the powerlessness of his own will when in conflict