with facility,
according to the phases of his destiny. There was in him the flexibility
of the Greek mind in the stirring periods of the democracy in Athens.
His deep study early directed his mind to history, that poem of men of
action. Plutarch nourished him with his manly diet. He moulded on the
antique figures drawn from life by the historian the ideal of his own
life, only all the parts of every great man suited him alike: he assumed
them by turns, realised them in his reveries, as suited to reproduce In
him the voluptuary as the sage, the malcontent as the patriot;
Aristippus as Themistocles; Scipio as Coriolanus. He mingled with his
studies the exercises of a military life, formed his body to fatigue, at
the same time that he fashioned his mind to lofty ideas; equally skilled
in handling a sword and daring in subduing a horse.

Demosthenes, by patience, formed a sonorous voice from a stammering
tongue. Dumouriez, with a weak and ailing constitution in his childhood,
enured his body for war. The stirring ambition of his soul required that
the frame which encased it should be of endurance.

III.

Opposing the desires of his father, who destined him for the war
office, the pen was his abhorrence, and he obtained a sub-lieutenancy in
the cavalry. As aide-de-camp of marshal d'Armentieres, he made the
campaign of Hanover. In a retreat he seized the standard from the hands
of a fugitive, rallied two hundred troopers round him, saved a battery
of five pieces of cannon, and covered the passage of the army. Remaining
almost alone in the rear, he made himself a rampart of his dead horse,
and wounded three of the enemy's hussars. Wounded in many places by
gun-shot and sabre wounds--his thigh entangled beneath a fallen
horse--two fingers of his right hand severed--his forehead cut open--his
eyes literally singed by a discharge of powder, he still fought, and
only surrendered prisoner to the Baron de Beker, who saved his life, and
conveyed him to the camp of the English.

His youth and good constitution restored him to health at the end of two
months. Destined to form himself to victory by the example of defeats,
and want of experience in our generals, he rejoined marshal de Soubise
and marshal de Broglie; and was present at the routs which the French
owe to their enmity and rivalry.

At the peace he went to rejoin his regiment in garrison at Saint Lo.
Passing by Pont Audemer, he stopped at the house of his father's sis