BY MARTINEAU AND WORDSWORTH.

THOSE who reel interested enough in the extraordinary for-
 tune- of Toussaint L'Ouverture to inquire concerning him
from the biographical dictionaries and popular histories of the
day, will find in them all the same brief and peremptory decision
con.'erning his character. They al pronounce him to have been
a man of wonderful sagacity, endowed with a nate genius for
both war and government ; but savage in warfare, hypocritical
in religio, using pi-ty as a plihtial nmsk, and, in all his
aftairQ, the tery prime of dissem'nblkcrs. It is tnio that this ac-
count ,ions-its ncitbi-r in the iaht.d of hi' lile. the opinions of
the people he delivered, nor the State doLumeuts of the
Land he governed. Yet it is easy to account for. The first
notices of him were French, reported by the discomfited invad-
erq of Saint Domingo to writers imbued with the philosophy of
the dla -of the Revolution; and later accounts are copies of
the'c- earlier ones. From the time when my attention was first
fised on this hero, I hare been struck with the inconsistencies
contained in all reports of' his iharater whit h ascribe to him
cruelty and lhypi- rizy; and, afitr a long and careful compari-
son of such \iews with his words and deeds, with the evidence
obtainable from Saint Domingo, and with the temper of his
time in Franr.e, I harve arrived at the conclusion that his char-
act.r wa-, in sober truth, su'h as I have endeavored to rep-c-
sernt it in the ton going work.
 I ldo n..t nean toi say that I am the first who has formed an
opinion tint Tou;saint was an honest, a religious, and a mild
and mer,:itul man. In an article in the Quarterly Review (No.
XI.I ) on the Past and Present State of Hayti," sointeresting
 29 337