CHAMBERS'S POCKET MISCELLANY. YOUNG NAPOLEON. THE story of this youth's brief and uneventful existence possesses a deep, though in some degree painful, interest. A course of policy over which he had no control, and the propriety of which it is no part of our present purpose to discuss, confined him through life to a strange and unnatural position, and exerted a blighting influence on his fate. From this the chief interest of the young Napoleon's history arises, and not from any incidents by which it was distinguished. Young Napoleon was born in Paris on the 20th March 1811. His birth was attended with danger both to the mother and the offspring, insomuch that the medical attendant, a man of the first celebrity in his profession, lost courage, and was afraid to do what was necessary. At this juncture, the Emperor Napoleon appeared in the apartment, and commanded him to proceed as if the patient were the wife of an ordinary burgess. Everything subsequently went on well, and the Emperor in a short time had the satisfaction of presenting his infant son to the assembled officers of the imperial court, by whom the child was hailed King of Rome'-the title which had been destined for him. At the same moment, the citizens of Paris were informed of the birth of an heir to the empire, by the reverberations of 100 cannon, which was the signal pre-appointed. When this event took place, the power of Napoleon was at its height, and the empire, of which the newlyborn infant was the undisputed heir-apparent, was the mightiest, certainly, to which any human being had ever had the prospect of succeeding. Reverses, however, one after another, began to shake this great power, even while the unconscious heir to it was passing his infant days in the lap of pomp and adulation. In 1814, the Empress Maria Louisa, who had been left in Paris, while the Emperor was engaged against the allied armies, conceived it necessary to leave the capital with her son, then three years old, on account of the approach of the enemy. This was the first time that the changes of the period had affected the boy, and he, according to Sir Walter Scott, 'is said to have shewn an unwillingness to depart, which, in a child, seemed to have something ominous in it;' as if he foreboded, young as he was, that there would be no return. Such was indeed the case; he never saw his father again. On Napoleon's abdication, and removal to Elba, Maria Louisa was not permitted to go with him, but was taken, along with her child, to the court of her father, the emperor of Austria. Neither by negotiation nor by stratagem could Napoleon ever afterwards procure the restoration of his wife and child. Though carried to Austria when little more than four years old, the previous life of the young Napoleon had been passed amid scenes of too striking a nature not to leave on his mind some deep impressions. His intelligence, moreover, was precocious, and his manners so grave and reflective, that it was a remark of the people' about him, that he never was a child.' Not being of a communicative disposition, he did not talk himself, as ordinary children would have done, out of the recollections of former days. They lay treasured in the heart of the |