Not that all Napoleons letters, or even many of them, are of a self revealing kind. In youth he had few confidants, in middle age he had little to confide. ln the stress of business and war he soon shed the idealism of the patriot, the fatalism of the evolutionary, and the romanticism of the lover. Any sense he may once have had of the beauty, the pathos, or even the humour of life was coarsened by flattery and success. He can still declare, exhort, abuse, persuade, even charm but always in the interest of a policy, and to gain an end. He is wise, clear-sighted, eloquent, heroic but hardly ever a human being in repose. Nevertheless, Napoleons letters remain, beyond anything written about him, or anything else he wrote or said about himself, by far his finest portrait. When he was a young man, Napoleon wrote in the rapid and already confused hand of the relatively rare letters signed Buonaparte or Bonaparte. With growing age and work, his handwriting became so slovenly as to be well-nigh illegible whilst his signature shortened from Napoleon to Napol., Nap., Np., and N. Though he still wrote some private letters, and the more important military and diplomatic despatches, he habitually employed secretaries, and carried on the bulk of his correspondence by dictation. Napoleon had three principal secretaries Bourrienne 1797-1802, Meneval 1802-13, and Fain 1806-14.