Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848

A third, and perhaps a more important qualification than either, is – that a fleet is the only form of national force which can never endanger national freedom.

On those data, the question of national fleets is easily decided. England is not only the first naval power in the world, but she must continue the first; because a fleet is necessary to her existence, which it is not to that of any other European throne. This is the dictate of nature, and is therefore a law. Other powers may possess a fleet as an appendage to their national strength, as suitable to their rank, or as adding to their means of hostilities. Still, to them, a fleet is not a necessity. Russia, France, and Spain have no more necessity for a fleet, than Prussia, Austria, and Switzerland! But England, without a fleet, would be exposed to invasion on every point of a coast extending two thousand miles. Her wealth is all loose upon the ocean; her chief territories are all beyond the ocean: thus, without a fleet, she would be almost wholly without the means of external defence, of retaliation for injuries, and of the commerce which is the most essential basis of her revenue. The result is, that, while the Continental kingdoms might be powerful states, yet not possess a ship on the seas, England, stript of her naval superiority, would instantly sink from her high position, would lose the larger portion of her power, would be separated from her most important colonies, would see her revenues decay, – and, if assailed by a foreign enemy, would see her resources suddenly stopped, and must prepare for the last extremities of struggle, hand to hand.

In this view, we do not confine the question to the national fondness for the sea – to that mixture of boldness and skill which predominates in the character of our sailors, and forms the especial qualification of a sea-faring people, – nor to national superiority of any kind; but to the simple fact, that the possession of predominant power on the ocean cannot be dispensed with by England, while it can be dispensed with by every other power of the globe.

There is also another reason for this supremacy; arising from the fact, that England may throw her whole national force into a navy; while other powers, however ambitious of naval eminence, must at least divide their force between the land and sea services. France, with its immense frontier, must keep up an immense army during war. Russia, with a frontier from the Niemen to the North Pole, must keep up an immense army at all times. The maintenance of those armies is essential to the national existence, while the maintenance of a fleet is only gratifying to the national ambition. The consequence is as clear as a matter of arithmetic. France and Russia, attacking England separately, must be ultimately beaten. America, even if she were a more formidable opponent than either, will also be beaten, and for the same reason. A fleet is not essential to her; the undivided force of the States will never be applied to her navy. The national strength will be expanded over inland conquest; the sea-coast towns will be rapidly reduced to insignificance by the superiority of the great inland settlements; and the time will come, when the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, will have no more weight with the inland powers of Louisiana and the prairies, than Brighton or Broadstairs have with the power of London. They will be watering places, or, at best, warehousing places, and will be no more able to keep up a navy, than the Isle of Thanet would be able to keep up the Channel fleet. All this, however, tends only to show, that a fleet is the supreme instrument of British dominion; and that its strength, its skill, and its discipline, should employ the utmost activity, liberality, and vigilance of every Cabinet which desires to do its duty to the empire.

We now proceed to give some account of the interesting and intelligent work of which Captain Plunket has supplied the translation, accompanied with valuable explanatory notes of his own.

Some time since, there appeared in the well-known Parisian Revue des deux Mondes, articles on the English and French naval systems, by a French officer, Captain de la Gravière. The object of those papers was less to give a history of the naval war, than to ascertain the causes of that almost unbroken series of triumphs which made the fame of the British fleet; and, on the other hand, which ultimately extinguished the fleet of a nation so brave, ambitious, and enterprising as the French.

M. de la Gravière, to his credit, had not followed the usual "perfide Albion" style of the French journalists, nor exhibited that jesuitical evasion of fact, and the perpetual peevishness against England, which marks and disgraces French history. He never sinks English success into failure, or inflates French failure into victory. He writes with the calmness of a man in search of the truth; judges with every visible intention of impartiality; examines the private documents of the transactions; and pronounces a judgment which, though obviously and essentially French, is perhaps as honest an effort in pursuit of the reality of things, as is compatible with the nature of our clever and lively libellers on the other side of the Channel.

Those volumes begin by some striking remarks of Napoleon at St Helena. This extraordinary man never spoke of his defeat at Acre in 1799 but with bitter regret. He declared that it was his intention, had he taken that fortress, to have marched to Constantinople at the head of the tribes of Mount Lebanon, or to have followed the steps of Alexander to the Indus. His repulse from Acre, he always said, "marred his destiny."

All this verbiage of the great Captain, however, has been sufficiently exposed by the actual event. He could no more have marched to Constantinople than he could have marched to the Indus, nor have marched to the Indus more than he could have marched to the Pole star. With but 40,000 men, (the whole number which landed in Egypt,) it would have been utterly impossible for him to have carried a force through Syria and Asia Minor equal to the attack on Constantinople – even if the Russians were not at hand. The march to the Indus would have lain through the deserts of Arabia and Persia, and have stripped him down to a corporal's guard before he had got half-way. A French foot would never have been dipt in that far-famed river, which is now a British Canal. The tribes of Lebanon would no more have recruited his ranks, than they would have given him their sequins. His destiny lay in another direction. No man knew this better; and doubtless he rejoiced, when he found himself on board the frigate carrying him westward, and relieving him of the "glory" of being slaughtered by the Arabs, and embalmed by the sands.

But the inveterate hostility of Napoleon seemed to rage against England, with the ravening of a mad dog, who dies biting the club which has laid him on the ground. All his anti-English policy was a succession of gross and ruinous blunders. To assail England without a fleet was naturally impossible. To form a fleet for the purpose of assailing her was, therefore, always a new temptation. If, after the First of June, which destroyed the Channel fleet of France, and the burning of the arsenals of Toulon, which destroyed her Mediterranean fleet, France had never built another vessel beyond the tonnage of a coaster, she would have shown her good sense. But Napoleon, when in the plenitude of power, went on building huge vessels, only to see them sent into English ports.

The waste of time, waste of thought, and waste of money, on those projects of English invasion, were among the most capital faults of his extravagant career. He might have made France the great corn country, or the great garden of Europe, with half the sums which he threw away only to be beaten. His fifty ships of the line which were to sweep the Channel, in the absence of our fleet – his one hundred and twenty thousand men on the shore of Boulogne – all only enhanced the naval glory of the great commander; who, after pursuing the French flying squadron of eighteen great ships, with ten, to the West Indies, finished in one day the naval war, extinguished the existence of the French and Spanish navies, and crowned his own gallant career.

The impolicy of these attempts was equally exhibited in another form – they stimulated at once the power and the spirit of England. The monotony of a war of defence would have disgusted the gallantry of the nation, but the victories of the British navy continually cheered the people under the burdens of the war. What minister could have dared to propose a "compromising" peace, on the day after the battle of the Nile? What minister would have dared to propose any peace on the day after Trafalgar? The war, too, broke down more than the French fleet – it buried the Opposition.

The French author divides his history into three periods – the first, that of the battles of Howe and Hood, of Hotham and Bridport; the second, that of Jervis; the third, (from 1798 to 1805) belonging to Nelson, without an equal, without even a competitor – the most glorious series of successes ever won on the ocean.

The true definition of these volumes is, in fact, a "Life of Nelson" – a hurried, but clear and animated memoir, on a subject which can never be too often repeated to the ear or the heart of Englishmen; but a subject which is here coloured with the inevitable, and yet not unamusing, prejudices of a Frenchman and an enemy. He admits Nelson to have been a naval hero, while he labours to show that his chief successes arose from a lofty disregard of circumstances, a native contempt of rule, a transcendental rashness, which, continually exposing him to the chance of utter ruin, strangely always issued in victory. But those views are wholly imaginary. It is the foreign habit, to be perpetually in pursuit of astonishment; to think nothing meritorious which is not magical; and to carry into the greatest and gravest operations of public life the passion for the harlequinades of the theatre. The supremacy of Nelson arose from the more substantial grounds, of a thorough knowledge of his profession, of a strict deference for discipline, and a sort of instinctive and unhesitating determination to do the work set before him, with all the powers of his mind and frame. He, of course, possessed personal intrepidity in the most complete degree; but this amounted simply to the exposure of his life on all occasions where duty was to be done. Nelson was no fire-eater – no man of quarrel. We are not aware that he ever fought a duel. But he knew what was due to himself as much as any man – a fact shown by his answer to the Governor of Jamaica, who, having, on some remonstrances to him, rather haughtily observed, "that old generals were not accustomed to take advice from young captains." Nelson retorted by letter – "That he was of the same age as the prime minister of England, (Pitt), and that he thought himself as capable of commanding one of his Majesty's ships, as the premier was of governing the state."

But Nelson could not have gained his glories alone: he made his captains like himself; and every sailor in his fleet was ready to die along with him. His art in this was the simple one of justice. He acknowledged every man's merit. The officer who distinguished himself, was sure of receiving due honour from Nelson; promotion was regulated by service, and every brave man was confident in the recommendation of the admiral. He was also a kind man by nature: he hated punishment on board; he spoke good-naturedly to the sailors; he even gave way to any peculiarity which was not injurious to discipline. Some of his crew had become Methodists, and, offended with the general coarse conversation of the ship, desired to have their mess separate. Nelson immediately gave the required permission. The hearts of men naturally follow such a leader.

He had also the powerful sagacity which insures confidence; and no man doubted that, when Nelson commanded, he was leading to victory. He was, besides, a master of his profession – all his battles were the finest lessons of the tactician. He was never outmanœuvred; he was never surprised; he was never even thrown into any difficulty, for which he had not a ready resource. The "Nelson touch" became proverbial; and the variety, completeness, and brilliancy of his plans for action sometimes excited the most extraordinary emotion, even to tears, among his officers. Something of this kind is said to have occurred on the final summoning of his captains into the cabin of the Victory, and laying before them his plan for the battle of Trafalgar.

Nelson had also the power, perhaps the most characteristic of genius, of throwing his thought into those shapes of vividness which penetrate at once to the understanding. When, on steering down for the French line at Aboukir, some one observed to him that the enemy were anchored too near the shore, for the British to pass within them; – "Where a French ship can swing, a British ship can anchor," was his decisive reply; and he instantly rushed in, and placed the French line between two fires. Another of those noble maxims was – "The captain cannot be wrong, who lays his ship alongside the enemy." It contains the whole theory of British battle. His "I can see no signal," when he was told that Admiral Parker had made the signal for retiring at Copenhagen, would have been immortalised, with the act which accompanied it, among the most brilliant "sayings and doings" of ancient Greece. But his last and well-known signal at Trafalgar surpassed all the rest, as much as the triumph surpassed these triumphs. The addresses of Napoleon to his armies were unquestionably fine performances. They spoke to the Frenchman by his feelings, his recollections, his personal pride, and his national renown. But, with the animation of the trumpet, they had its sternness and harshness. They were invocations to the French idol, that was to be worshipped only with perpetual blood. But the signal at Trafalgar recalled the Englishman only to the feelings of home. The voice of war never spoke a language more capable of being combined with all the purposes of peace. "England expects every man to do his duty" was fitted to bring before the Englishman the memory of his country, his home, his wife and children, all who might feel concerned in his conduct and character in the proud transactions of that great day. We think it the noblest appeal to national feeling ever made by a warrior to warriors.

Yet, what was the especial secret of that supreme rank which Nelson held over all the naval leaders of his time? Others may have been as intelligent, and indefatigable, and, it is to be hoped, all were as brave. The secret was – that Nelson was never satisfied with what he had done, and that he never half did anything. There was no "drawn battle," among his recollections. This is the more remarkable, as, for fifty years before, nearly all our naval battles had been drawn battles. Rodney's defeat of de Grasse was the great exception. British admirals, who were afraid of nothing else, were afraid of losing their masts! and were content with knocking down those of the enemy. Great fleets met each other, passed in parallel lines, fired their broadsides as they passed, one to the north and the other to the south. They might as well have been firing salutes. The wind soon carried them out of sight of each other; the admirals sat down in their cabins to write their respective histories of "the battle," which would have been only too much honoured by being called a brush; and the fleets went by mutual consent into harbour. In this sort of War! the French were as clever as we; and the Suffreins, di Guichens, d'Estaings, and Villeneuves, made their fame on this system of cannonading a mile off, and getting out of the way as quickly as possible.

Rodney first spoiled the etiquette of those affairs, by driving straight forward through the enemy's line, changing the easy parallel for the fighting perpendicular, and compelling at least one-half of the Frenchmen to come to close quarters. This was the method of Jervis, when his captain told him, that the fleet on which he was bearing down in the morning twilight were at least twenty. "If they were fifty," said the brave sailor, "I'll drive through them." He drove through them accordingly, and beat the Spaniards, with half their numbers.

Wellington observed, in the Peninsula, that the generals commanding under him were afraid of nothing but responsibility. This fear arose from the ignorant insolence, with which the loungers of the legislature were in the habit of fighting campaigns over their coffee-cups. It is to be hoped that the fashion has since changed. But Wellington demurred to the authority, and Nelson seemed not to have thought of its existence. They both supplied the sufficient answer to the home campaigners, by beating the enemy wherever they met him.

We find a striking evidence of the hatred of "doing well enough" in one of Nelson's letters to his wife, on Hotham's battle with the French, under Martin, off Genoa, in 1795. Hotham was one of the old school, and though, in two awkward engagements, he had taken two of the French line, while a third had been burned, Nelson was indignant that the whole French fleet had not been captured. He had urged the admiral to leave the disabled ships in charge of the frigates, and chase the French.

"But," says the letter, "he, much cooler than myself, said, 'we must be contented —we had done very well.'" Nelson's evidently disgusted remark on this species of contentment is – "Had we taken ten sail, and suffered the eleventh to escape, when we could have got at her, I could never have called it well done." In another part he says, "I wish to be an admiral, and in command of the British fleet. I should very soon do much, or be ruined. My disposition cannot bear tame and slow measures. Sure I am, that, had I commanded our fleet on the 14th, the whole French fleet would have graced our triumph, or I should have been in a confounded scrape." This was the language which, like the impulse of a powerful instinct, predicted the days of Aboukir, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar.

But the drag-chain on the progress of British intrepidity was at length to be taken of. Hotham was succeeded by Jervis. This eminent officer instantly reformed the whole condition of the Mediterranean fleet. He had evidently adopted the same conception of naval merit, which Nelson had so long kept before his eye. In selecting him for the command of the squadron sent to the Nile, Jervis wrote to the admiralty: "Nelson is an officer, who, whatever you bid him do, is sure to do more." And, in this spirit, Nelson was not content with running to Alexandria, and returning to say, that he found no one there; his resolve was, to find the French wherever they were, and fight them wherever they were found.

One word still for gallant old Jervis, the man who first confirmed the discipline of the navy. His firmness was the secret. When the Irish conspirators on board the Channel fleet had spread the spirit of mutiny in 1797, Jervis was warned from the admiralty that his fleet was in danger. It was suggested to him by some of his officers, to stop the letters from home: "No," said he, "the precaution is useless: I will answer for it that the commander-in-chief of this fleet will know how to maintain his authority, if it is threatened."

But he left nothing to chance: he prohibited communication between the ships – he sent for the captains of marines, and ordered that their men should mess and sleep separately from the sailors; that the sailors should not be suffered to converse in Irish, and that the officers should be on the alert. He hanged the detected mutineers without delay. Forgiveness was out of the question. To Captain Pellew, who had interceded in favour of a mutineer, whose conduct had previously been irreproachable, he replied, "We have, we think, punished only the worthless. It is time, that our men should learn, that no past conduct can redeem an act of treason."

Nothing could be more rational, or even more necessary, than this determination; for treason is the most comprehensive of all crimes. The mere robber, or murderer, commits his single act of guilt – but the guilt of the traitor may cost the lives of thousands. The traitor is never to be regarded as a solitary criminal, and this maxim was never more necessary than at this moment. If laws are to be turned into sentimentality, and conspiracy is to be dealt with like the tricks of children, there must be an end of all security to honest men. If the villains who have been lately inflaming the Irish mind into madness, had been hanged by the sentence of the drum-head, within half an hour after their seizure, there would have been no necessity, at this moment, for keeping up a garrison of 45,000 men in Ireland. Martial law is the only law fit for the ruffians of the torch and pike, and the gibbet is the only moral which they will ever comprehend. To suppose that the Irish conspirators had even entertained the expectation of forming an established government, or of being suffered by England to raise a republic – or that any man out of Bedlam could have dreamt of the possibility of waging a successful war against England, while her fleets might starve Ireland in a week, and nothing but English alms even now enables her to live – would be absolute folly. The true object of Irish conspiracy was, and is, and will always be, robbery and revenge; a short burst of rapine and blood, followed by again running away, again begging pardon, again living on alms, and again laughing at the weak indulgence and insulted clemency of England.

Jervis, instead of listening to the cant of men of blood whining about their wives and children, hanged them; and, by thus ridding his fleet of a nest of villains, saved it from destruction, and perhaps, with it, saved not merely the lives of thousands of brave men, whom their impunity might have debauched into conspiracy, but saved the honour of our naval name, and restored the enfeebled hopes of his country.

We here quote with pleasure from the Frenchman: – "Jervis, in the face of those symptoms, which threatened the British navy with disaffection, sternly devoted himself to the establishment of implicit obedience. The efficient organisation of the fleet was the labour of his life, and occupied his latest thoughts. Never rash himself, he nevertheless opened the way for the most daring deeds. Nelson rushed into the arena, and, with the rapidity of lightning, showed the latent results of the change. The governing principle witnessed, rather than decreed the change. Its source, in fact, was not in the Admiralty, but in those floating camps, wherein the triumphs which astonish us are gradually elaborated. Official power is but the inert crucible which transmutes the subsidies of Parliament into ships. But a quickening principle is wanting to those immense fleets, and the admirals supply it. Jervis and Nelson rapidly transmitted the creative spark, and bequeathed a certain sort of sovereignty under the distrustful eye of the English Admiralty – a kind of dynasty arose – 'the mayors of the palace took the sceptre from the do-nothing kings.'"

All this is comparatively just. But the Frenchman peeps out under the panegyrist, after all. Can it be conceived that any other human being, at the end of nearly half a century, would quote, with the slightest degree of approval, the report of Decrès, the French minister of the marine to Napoleon, in 1805, after all Nelson's victories, and just preceding the most illustrious of them all – Trafalgar?

"The boasting of Nelson," writes Decrès, "equals his silliness, (ineptie) – I use the proper word. But he has one eminent quality – namely, that of aiming among his captains only at a character for bravery and good fortune. This makes him accessibleto counsel, and consequently, in difficult circumstances, if he commands nominally, others direct really."

We have no doubt that, after scribbling this supreme ineptie, Decrès considered himself to have settled the whole question, and to have convicted Nelson of being simply a bold blockhead – Nelson, the man of the hundred fights – the prince of tacticians – the admiral who had never been beaten, and from whom, at the battle of Aboukir, Decrès himself was rejoiced to make his escape, after having seen the ruin of the French fleet.

We find a good deal of the same sort of petulant perversion, in the narrative of Nelson's conduct at Naples. M. Gravière suddenly becomes moral, and tells us the ten-times-told story of Lady Hamilton. But what is all this to the naval war? Englishmen are not bound to defend the character of Lady Hamilton; and if Nelson was actually culpable in their intercourse, (a matter which actually has never yet been proved,) Englishmen, who have some morality, – not Frenchmen, who make a point of laughing at all morality – may upbraid his conduct. But a French stoic is simply ridiculous. There are perhaps not fifty men in all France, who would not have done, and are not doing every day, where they have the opportunity, all that this moralist charges Nelson with having done. Even if he were criminal in his private life, so much the worse for himself in that solemn account which all must render; but he was not the less the conqueror of Copenhagen, Aboukir, and Trafalgar.

The hanging of Caraccioli also figures among the charges. We regret that this traitor was not left to die of remorse, or by the course of nature, at the age of eighty. We regret, too, that he could allege even the shadow of a capitulation for his security. We equally regret the execution of Ney under a similar shadow. But Caraccioli had been an admiral in the Neapolitan service, had joined the rebellion by which rapine and slaughter overspread the country, and had driven the King into exile. No man more deserved to be hanged, by the order of his insulted, and apparently ruined King; – he was hanged, and all rebels ought thus to suffer. They are made for the scaffold.

The men who plunge a kingdom in blood, whose success must be purchased by havoc, and whose triumph makes the misery of thousands or millions, ought to make the small expiation which can be made by their public punishment; and no country can be safe in which it is not the custom to hang traitors. Still, those acts, even if they were of an order which might shock the sensibility of a Frenchman to breach of treaty, or the sight of blood, have no reference to the talents and the triumphs of Nelson.

But these volumes suddenly deviate from the history of the great admiral, into remarks on the great living soldier of England. There, too, we must follow them; and our task is no reluctant one; for it enables us at once to enlighten intelligent inquiry, and to offer our tribute to pre-eminent fame. But, in this instance, we argue with our accomplished neighbours on different principles. The Frenchman loves glory – the Englishman its fruits. The Frenchman loves the excitement of war; the Englishman hates it, as mischievous and miserable, and to be palliated only by the stern necessity of self-defence. He honours intrepidity, but it only when displayed in a cause worthy of human feeling. No man more exults in the talent of the field; but it is only when it brings back security to the fireside. The noblest trophy of Wellington, in the eyes of his country, is the thirty years of peace won by his sword!

It has become the fashion of the French to speak of this illustrious personage with something of a sneer at what they pronounce his "want of enterprise." Every thing that he has done is by "phlegm!" Phlegm must be a most valuable quality, in that case, for it enabled him to defeat every officer to whom he had been opposed; and there was scarcely any man of repute in the French army to whom he had not been opposed. It is in no spirit of rational taunt, or of that hostility which, we will hope, has died away between England and France, that we give the list of the French marshals whom Wellington has fought, and always beaten, and several of them several times: – Junot at Vimeira, Soult at Oporto and the Pyrenees, Victor and Sebastiani at Talavera, Massena at Busaco, Marmont at Salamanca, Jourdan at Vitoria, and a whole group of the chief generals of France, with Ney, Soult, and Napoleon himself, at their head, at Waterloo.

But have the British military authors ever doubted the talent, or disparaged the gallantry, of those distinguished soldiers? Certainly not; they have given them every acknowledgment which ability and bravery could demand. Let the French nation read the eloquent pages of Alison, and see the character given by the historian to the leaders in the Italian, German, and Spanish campaigns. Let them read the spirited pages of Napier, and see them decorated almost with the colours of romance. Does either of these popular and powerful authors stigmatise the French generals with "ineptie," or characterise their victories, as the mere results of inability either to attack or to run away? Let them be the example of the future French military writers, and let those writers learn that there is a European tribunal, as well as a Parisian one.

But the French altogether mistake the question. Men like Wellington are not the growth of any military school, of any especial army, or of any peculiar nation. Without offering this great soldier any personal panegyric, he was a military genius. Since Marlborough, England had produced no such commander of an army, and may not produce another such for a century to come. Nelson was similarly a genius: he sprang at once to the first rank of sea-officers; and England, fertile as she is in first-rate sailors and brave men, may never produce another Nelson. Napoleon was a genius, and almost as palpably superior to the crowd of brave and intelligent generals round him, as if he had been of another species. The conduct of men of this exclusive capacity is no more a rule for other men, than their successes are to be depreciated to the common scale of military good fortune. The campaigns of Napoleon in Italy; the sea campaign in which Nelson pursued the French fleet half-round the globe, to extinguish it at Trafalgar; the seven years' continued campaign of Wellington in the Peninsula, finished by the most splendid march in European history, from the frontier of Portugal into the heart of France, have had no example in the past, and can be no example to the future. The principle, the power, and the success, lie equally beyond the limits of ordinary calculation. The evident fact is, that there is an occasional rank of faculty, which puts all calculation out of sight, which is found to produce effects of a new magnitude, and which overpasses all difficulties, by the use of an intellectual element, but occasionally, and but for especial purpose, communicated to man.

We have no doubt whatever of the truth of this solution, and are consequently convinced, that it would have been much wiser in M. Gravière to have attempted to describe the career of Wellington, than to pronounce on the principles of his science; and, above all, than to account for his victories by the very last means of victory – the mere brutishness of standing still, the simple immobility of passive force, the mere unintelligent and insensate working of a machine.

"What a contrast," exclaims the Frenchman, "between these passionate traits (of Nelson) and the impassive bearing of Wellington, that cool and methodical leader, who maintained his ground in the Peninsula by the sheer force of order and prudence! Do they belong to the same nation? Did they command the same men? The admiral, full of enthusiasm, and devoured by the love of distinction, and the general, so phlegmatic and immovable, who, intrenched behind his lines at Torres Vedras, or re-forming, without emotion, his broken squares on the field of Waterloo – (where not a single British square was broken) – seems rather to aim at wearying out his enemy than at conquering him, and triumphs only by his patient and unconquerable firmness."

Must it not be asked, Why did the French suffer him to exhibit this firmness? why did they not beat him at once? Do generals win battles merely by waiting, until their antagonists are tired of crushing them?

But the Frenchman still has a resource – he accounts for it all by the design of a higher power! "It was thus, nevertheless, that the designs of Providence were to be accomplished. It gave to the general, destined to meet incontestably superior troops(!!), whose first efforts were irresistible, that systematic and temporising character, which was to wear out the ardour of our soldiers." Having thus accounted for the French perpetuity of defeat on land, by a man of stupidity and stone; he accounts, with equal satisfaction, for the perpetuity of defeat at sea by a man of activity and animation. "To the admiral who was to meet squadrons fresh out of harbour, and easily disconcerted by a sudden attack, Providence gave that fiery courage and audacity which alone could bring about those great disasters, that would not have been inflicted under the rules of the old school of tactics."

The Frenchman, in his eagerness to disparage Wellington as dull, and Nelson as rash, forgets that he forces his reader to the conclusion, that tardiness and precipitancy are equally fit to beat the French. Or if they are incontestably superior troops, and their first onset is irresistible, how is it that they are beaten at the last, or are ever beaten at all? We also find the curious and rather unexpected acknowledgment, that Providence was always against them, and that it had determined on their defeat, whether their enemy were swift or slow.

We are afraid that we have been premature in giving M. de la Gravière credit for getting rid of his prejudices. But we shall set him a better example. We shall not deny that the French make excellent soldiers; that they have even a sort of national fitness for soldiership; that they form active, bold, and highly effective troops: though, for them, as sailors, we certainly cannot say as much. Henry IV. remarked "that he never knew a French king lucky at sea;" and Henry spoke the truth. And the wisest thing which France could do, would be to give up all attempts to be a "naval power," – which she never has been, and never can be – and expend her money and her time on the comforts, the condition, and the spirit of her people, both citizens and soldiery.

But, we must assist the French judgment on the character of Wellington: and a slight detail will prove him to be the most enterprising leader of troops in the history of modern Europe. Let us first settle the meaning of the word enterprise. It is not a foolish restlessness, a giddy fondness for the flourish of Bulletins, or a precipitate habit of rushing into projects unconsidered and ineffective. It is activity, guided by intelligence; a daring effort to attain a probable success. The French generals, in the commencement of the revolutionary war, dashed at every thing, and yet were not entitled to the praise of enterprise. They fought under the consciousness that, unless they attracted Parisian notice by their battles, they must pay the penalty with their heads. Thus nearly all the principal generals of the early Republic were guillotined. The levée-en-masse gave them immense multitudes, who must fight, or starve. The Republic had fourteen armies at once in the field, who must be fed; commissioners from Paris were in the camps; and the general who declined to fight on all occasions, was stripped of his epaulets, and sent to the "Place de Grève."

But enterprise, in the style which distinguishes a master of strategy, is among the rarest military qualities. Marlborough was almost the only officer, in the last century, remarkable for enterprise, and its chief example was his march from Flanders to attack the French and Bavarian army, which he routed in the magnificent triumph of Blenheim. Wolfe's attack on the heights of Abraham was a capital instance of enterprise, for it showed at once sagacity and daring, and both in pursuit of a probable object, – the surprise of the enemy, and the power of bringing him to an engagement on fair ground.

But enterprise has been the chief characteristic of the whole military career of Wellington.

His first great Indian victory, Assaye, (23d September 1802,) was an "enterprise," by which, in defiance of all difficulties, and with but 5000 men, he beat the army of Scindiah and the rajah of Berar, consisting of 50,000, of which 30,000 were cavalry. There, instead of phlegm, he was accused of rashness; but his answer was, the necessity of stopping the enemy's march; and, more emphatic still, a most consummate victory.

On his landing in Portugal, at the head of only 10,000 men, (August 5, 1808,) this man of phlegm instantly broke up the whole plan of Junot. He first dashed at Laborde, commanding a division of 6000 men, as the advanced guard of the main army; drove him from the mountain position of Roliça; marched instantly to meet Junot, whom he defeated at Vimeira; and, on the 15th of September, the British troops were in possession of Lisbon. The French soon embarked by a convention, and Portugal was free! This was the work of a six-weeks' campaign by this passive soldier.

The convention of Cintra excited displeasure in England, as the capture of the whole army had been expected, from the high public opinion of the British commander; and the opinion would not have been disappointed, if he had continued in the command. The testimony of Colonel Torrens, (afterwards military secretary to the Duke of York,) on the court of inquiry, was, "That, on the defeat of the French at Vimeira, Sir Arthur rode up to Sir Harry Burrard and said – 'Now, Sir Harry, is your time to advance upon the enemy; they are completely broken, and we may be in Lisbon in three days.' Sir Harry's answer was, 'that he thought a great deal had been done.'" The army was halted, and the French, who felt that their cause was hopeless, sent to propose the convention.