I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with the brush of
infamy. . . . vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"[17] A little
later, his letter to Buttafuoco, deputy in the Constituent Assembly
and principal agent in the annexation to France, is one long strain of
renewed, concentrated hatred, which, after at first trying to restrain
it within the bounds of cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-
hot lava, in a torrent of scorching invective. - From the age of
fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his regiment, he finds
refuge in imagination in the past of his island;[18] he recounts its
history, his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he dedicates his
work to Paoli. Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and
dedicates the abridgment to Abbé Raynal, recapitulating in a strained
style, with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small
community, its revolts and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary
outbreaks, its public and domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals,
revenges, loves, and murders, - in short, a history similar to that of
the Scottish highlanders, while the style, still more than the
sympathies, denotes the foreigner. Undoubtedly, in this work, as in
other youthful writings, he follows as well as he can the authors in
vogue - Rousseau, and especially Raynal; he gives a schoolboy
imitation of their tirades, their sentimental declamation, and their
humanitarian grandiloquence. But these borrowed clothes, which
incommode him, do not fit him; they are too tight, and the cloth is
too fine; they require too much circumspection in walking; he does not
know how to put them on, and they rip at every seam. Not only has he
never learned how to spell, but he does not know the true meaning,
connections, and relations of words, the propriety or impropriety of
phrases, the exact significance of imagery;[19] he strides on
impetuously athwart a pell-mell of incongruities, incoherencies,
Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly stumbling along through