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yoked three Cape horses abreast, in the French style, and if he got any one into this, he seldom let his victim out until he had frightened him heartily. One day he told General Gourgaud to make his horse rear and put his fore feet into the carriage, to my great terror. He seemed, indeed, to possess no nerves himself, and to laugh at the existence of fear in others.

Napoleon, as far as I was capable of judging, could not be considered fond of literature. He seldom introduced the topic in conversation, and I suspect his reading was confined almost solely to scientific subjects. I have heard him speak slightingly of poets, and call them réveurs, and still I believe the most visionary of them all, was the only one he ever perused. But his own vast and undefined schemes of ambition, seemed to have found something congenial in the dreamy sublimities of Ossian.