coats can ever prevent the lower extremities of the Marshal from presenting the appearance of a parenthesis. He received his wound in storming Monte Creto, at the time when Massena was besieged in Genoa. His voice is rather guttural, and its tone severe, as if belonging to a man who had passed his life in the camp.

No one acquainted with his history, can behold the old veteran limping to his seat, without emotion. One of the chief props and pillars of Napoleon's throne, and one of the principal actors in that great drama which he enacted on the plains of Europe, his presence calls to mind many a fierce fought battle, and many a victory too. During some of those frequently stupid seances of the Chamber, I have often wondered, as I looked down on Soult in his seat, whether he, too, was not thinking of his struggles along the Rhine, or his bivouacs in the Alps, or of some of those fearful scenes he witnessed in Spain.

Nicholas-Jean-de-Dieu Soult was born in the small town of Amans, Department of Tarn, the 29th of March, 1769, or about four months after Bonaparte. His father was a country Notary, of no distinction, and apparently unable to control the restless spirit of his boy, let him choose his own course of life. Young Soult could not brook the confinement of study, and read little, and that not of the most instructive kind, and becoming perfectly disgusted with the old parchments of his father, at the age of sixteen entered, as a volunteer, in a regiment of the Royal Infantry. The revolution opened an ample field for his genius, and during the first struggles of the Republic he distinguished himself by his skill and bravery, and rapidly went up from Sergeant to Under