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or rather, which would have been prevented, had the father of some eminent character formed a different matrimonial connection. Suppose the father of Bonaparte had married any other lady than the one who was actually destined to become his mother. Agreeably to the tenor of the preceding observations, it is obvious that Bonaparte himself would not have appeared in the world; the affairs of France would have fallen into different hands, and have been conducted in another manner; the measures of the British cabinet, the debates in Parliament, the subsidies to foreign powers, the battles by sea and land, the marches and countermarches, the wounds, deaths, and promotions, the fears, hopes, and anxieties of a thousand individuals, would all have been different. The speculations of those writers and speakers who employed themselves in discussing these various subjects, and canvassing the conduct of this celebrated man, would not have been called forth. The train of ideas in every mind interested in public affairs would not have been the same; Pitt would not have made the same speeches, nor Fox the same replies; Lord Byron's poetry would have wanted some splendid passages; the Duke of Wellington might have still been plain Arthur Wellesley; Mr. Warden would not have written his book, nor the Edinburgh critic his review of it; nor could the

author of this essay have availed himself of this illustration. The imagination of the reader will easily carry him through all the consequences to soldiers and sailors, tradesmen and artisans, printers and booksellers, downward through every gradation of society. In a word, when we take into account these various consequences, and the thousand ways in which the mere intelligence of Bonaparte's proceedings, and of the measures pursued to counteract them, influenced the feelings, the speech, and the actions of mankind, it is scarcely too much to say, that the single circumstance of Bonaparte's marrying as he did, has more or less affected almost every individual in Europe, as well as a numerous multitude in the other quarters of the globe."

Dr. Southey stretches his imagination farther still: "A single miscarriage among my millions of grandmothers might have cut off the entail from my mortal being; the snuff of a candle, a fall, a fright—such things are happening daily-one such among them all, I tremble to think of it! One of my ancestors was, as the phrase is, out in a certain rebellion; his heart led him into the field, and his heels got him out of it; had he been less nimble, or had he been taken, and hanged-and hanged he would have been if taken-there would have been no Ego at this day; no history of Dr. Daniel Dove,-the

doctor would have been like the heroes who lived before Agamemnon, and his immortaliser would never have lived at all."

All this may be very frivolous;-but, perhaps, the contingencies of Biography might form as profitable a study as its uses, nay, be a preliminary chapter to its uses.

Trifles appear to be the very pivots and axletrees of even the greatest biographies. A trifle is sometimes the centre of a future history.Innumerable trifles have preserved us all until this moment. On what a number of trivial brittle threads hung the "Pilgrim's Progress" of Bunyan; for he had some providential escapes during his early life. Once he fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river. Once, near Bedford, and each time narrowly escaped drowning. One day an adder crossed his path. He stunned it with a kick, then forced open its mouth with a stick, and plucked out the tongue, which he supposed to be the sting, with his fingers,-" by which act," he says, "had not God been merciful unto me, I might, by my desperateness, have brought myself to an end." If this, indeed, were an adder, and not a harmless snake, his escape from the fangs was more remarkable than he himself was aware of. A circumstance, which was likely to impress him more deeply, occurred in the

eighteenth year of his age, when, being a soldier

drawn out to go

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in the Parliament's army, he was to the siege of Leicester, in 1645. company wished to go in his stead; Bunyan consented to exchange with him; and his volunteer substitute, standing sentinel one day at the siege, was shot through the head with a musket-ball. "This risk," Sir Walter Scott observes, but surely with less propriety than marks his usual observations, "was one somewhat resembling the escape of Sir Roger de Coverley in an action at Worcester, who was saved from the slaughter of the action by having been absent from the field."

It appears amazing to us that Milton should have been preserved to write the "Paradise Lost.' His life was sought, and he was only saved by a mock funeral.

Somebody has said, there is no such thing in the world as a trifle; there is certainly no little event, but it is beneath the dominion of some sovereign law. A step to the right or the left preserves the soldier from the unseen bullet. A hasty word has sometimes cost a man his life, and an idle laugh or a careless jest has broken the ties of the strongest friendship, Comines, the historian, was once visiting the Duke of Burgundy, and returning, he sportively commanded the duke to pull off his boots. The duke performed the service for

him, but concluded by thrusting the boot into the historian's face. For this offence, Comines ever afterwards sought by his writings, to render the duke infamous; and, when many years had passed, his books were tinctured with the venom of hatred. We do not yet understand, and very few persons believe, that by a law within itself, every thought propagates and grows down to the remotest ages of time, nay, we say, eternity; that actions however trifling, as surely perpetuate their kind, and like, as any other active living product whatever.

It is impossible for the full results of any action to be foreseen. The future cannot be reached from the highest pedestal of the present. Many deeds, at first, seem as insignificant as the little mountain stream, that sends out into the valley a slender tiny thread, but which goes on enlarging and expanding until it becomes a mighty river. "No man can at the same time fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile." little waters that genius calls forth from the rock of truth in this day, are destined to become the salvation streams of future generations. Who of the living of our time will be denominated greatest in future ages, is all a mystery. Perhaps he is now bending over his flickering lamp, in some dim closet which the world's cold eye has

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