would have been permanent, as what could France do after the treaty of Paris? What was to be feared from her?

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"These," continued Napoleon, were my reasons for attacking the English. I had beaten the Prussians. Before twelve o'clock, I had succeeded. Every thing was mine, I may say, but accident and destiny decided it otherwise. The English fought most bravely, doubtless; nobody can deny it. But they must have been destroyed."

On another occasion, the Emperor Napoleon, alluding to this fatal battle, exclaimed to Count Las Cases, "Ah! unfortunate army! brave men! You never fought better!" Then after pausing a few moments, he added in a tone expressive of deep feeling" We had some great poltroons amongst us! May Heaven forgive them! But as to France, will SHE ever surmount the effects of that ill fated day!"

DISASTERS OF THE FRENCH ARMY DURING THE

RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.

IN Sir Robert Wilson's work on the great power of Russia, we have the following description of the dreadful state of the French army in its retreat from Moscow. Sir Robert attributes the failure of the campaign to the want of proper horse shoes when the frost set in so severely. "There can be no desire to exalt the reputation of Napoleon, or to disparage, if it were possible for detractions to do so, the valour of the heroic army and brave people opposed to him; an army to whose devotion Napoleon himself has paid the highest tribute, when he

describes the battalions writhing under his fire, as unwilling to stop, as unwilling to go, and yet unable to remain; but the fact is, that from want of energy in the direction of the Russian operation, and a determination not to make a concentrated and general attack on the enemy's line of march, the French army would have regained their positions on the Dwina and Boristhenes, with at any serious injury, had it not been for a sudden and intense frost, and a total neglect to provide horse shoes suitable to the climate, excepting for Napoleon's own horses, which General Caulincourt saved by the precaution. Once again established on this line, the winter might have been passed in perfect security, since Austria would have been awed into effective co-operation, and all the resources of Poland would have been brought into action for the ensuing campaign. During the retreat, a ducat, then worth one pound sterling, was, with thanks, the price of a single horse shoe, even in the Russian army. But the Russian horses in their own country are always rough shod that they may be prepared for the frost.

"In the hospital of Wilna, there were left above seventeen thousand dead and dying, frozen and freezing; the bodies of the former, broken up, served to stop the cavities in windows, floors, and walls; but in one of the corridors of the Great Convent, above one thousand five hundred bodies were piled up transversely, like pigs of lead or iron. When these were finally removed, on sledges, to be burned, the most extraordinary figures were presented by the variety of their attitudes, for none seemed to have been frozen in a composed state; each was

fixed in the last action of his life, in the last direction given to his limbs, even the eyes retaining the last expression, either of anger, pain, or entreaty. In the roads, men were collected round the burning ruins of the cottages, which a mad spirit of destruction had fired, picking and eating the burnt bodies of fellow men, while thousands of horses were moaning in agony, with their flesh mangled and hacked to satisfy the cravings of a hunger that knew no pity. In many of the sheds, men, scarcely alive, had heaped on their frozen bodies human carwhich, festering by the communication of animal heat, had mingled the dying and the dead in one mass of putrefaction!!!"

casses,

DELICACY O LORD KEITH TO NAPOLEON.

PREVIOUS to the examination of Napoleon's effects, on board the Bellerophon, Count Las Cases went on board the Tonnant, and demanded of Lord Keith whether it was probable those appointed to search would go so far as to deprive the emperor of his sword. His lordship, a fine looking old man, of highly polished manners, received him with great politeness, and said, it would be respected; but that Napoleon was the only person exempted, as all his followers would be disarmed. A secretary, who was writing near us, observed to Lord Keith, that the orders stated that Napoleon himself was to be disarmed; upon which the admiral, turning round to this impertinent underling, drily replied, "Mind your own business, sirrah, and leave us to ourselves."

DAGGER MEN.

CONTINUAL accounts from Italy state the inability of the papal court to secure the safety of travellers from the attacks of the banditti which infest every where the states of the church. When the French army took possession of Rome, a decree was issued prohibiting what had long prevailed there, the appearance of a class of men carrying long knives, whose office and occupation was pretty notorious, from the frequency of assassination which then prevailed. Some of these gentlemen of the dagger, regardless of the decree, had the audacity to make their appearance in the streets with their usual weapons in a day or two after the decree had been published and posted. Nine of them were apprehended and instantly executed, not charged with having employed their weapons, but with having carried them after the prohibition. During all the time that the French occupied Rome, that is, downto the period of the return of the pope, none of these fellows dared to show themselves, there were no assassinations, the people were secure from their assaults, and from the rapacity of brigands. But no sooner was an ecclesiastic allowed to resume the reins of a civil government, than the dagger men made their appearance in public, armed as before the invasion of the French; and assassination again became, and still continues frequent.

THE CENACOLO OF LEONARDO DA VINCI.

"IN the refectory, or hall of the convent of the dominicans," says Eustace, in his Classical Tour through Italy, was, as is well known, the celebrated Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, supposed to be his masterpiece. The convent was suppressed; and the hall turned into a store-room of artillery; and the picture was used as a target for the French soldiers to fire at. The heads were their favourite marks, and that of our Saviour, in preference to the others." In all that has been brought against the French, of truth or calumny, there is nothing comparable to this act for barbarity, sacrilege, wanton, wilful, and atrocious outrage. The original Cenacolo of Leonardo da Vinci, which the splendid engraving of Morghen has given to the admiration of the world, the unrivalled fresco, the chef-d'œuvre of that Leonardo, at once the Newton and the Raphael of his age, turned into a target for soldiers to shoot at!!-for French soldiers too, for whose country Leonardo forsook his Italy, and in the arms of whose most popular king, Francis I. he died. The French should never be forgiven this wanton deed, if the story were true;-fortunately it is, from beginning to end, entirely false.

When the French army arrived at Milan, some cavalry were quartered in the convent, which had previously been devoted to military services, and the horses were stabled in the refectory, by order of the subaltern Milanese authorities, who had the direction of this measure of police. A young

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