'Say, too, that I received his Life of Napoleon, and have read it this winter - in the evening and at night - with attentino from beginning to end. To me it was full of meaning to observe how the first novelist of the century took upon himself a task and business, so apparently foreign to him, and passed under review with rapid stroke those important events of which it had been our fate to be eyewtinesses. The division into chapters, embracing masses of intimately connected events, gives a clearness to the historical sequence that otherwise might have been only to easily confused, while, at the same time, the individual events in each chapter are described with a clearness and a vividness quite invaluable.'