to understand why he imagined that the French would transfer their army into the destitution of the Corsican mountains from the fertile plains of Lombardy, abandoning the latter to their enemy, and exchanging their assured communications with France for the uncertainties and irregularities of a water transit over seas commanded by the British fleet.  The tenure of the island, as he well knew, depended upon the willing support of the Corsicans themselves; in the equal balance of the existing war, neither belligerent could maintain its control against the opposition of the natives.

This anticipation, in its disregard of the perfectly obvious conditions, was scarcely worthy of Nelson’s real native sagacity, and shows clearly how much a man, even of genius, is hampered in the conclusions of actual life by the lack of that systematic ordering and training of the ideas which it is the part of education to supply.  Genius is one thing, the acquirements of an accomplished—­instructed—­officer are another, yet there is between the two nothing incompatible, rather the reverse; and when to the former, which nature alone can give,—­and to Nelson did give,—­is added the conscious recognition of principles, the practised habit of viewing, under their clear light, all the circumstances of a situation, assigning to each its due weight and relative importance, then, and then only, is the highest plane of military greatness attained.  Whether in natural insight Nelson fell short of Napoleon’s measure need not here be considered; that he was at this time far inferior, in the powers of a trained intellect, to his younger competitor in the race for fame, is manifest by the readiness with which he accepted such widely ex-centric conjectures as that of an attempt by sea upon Leghorn at the opening of the campaign, and now upon Corsica by a great part, if not the whole, of the army of Italy.

“On the side of the French,” says Jomini, speaking of Bonaparte at this very period, “was to be seen a young warrior, trained in the best schools, endowed with an ardent imagination, brought up upon the examples of antiquity, greedy of glory and of power, knowing thoroughly the Apennines, in which he had distinguished himself in 1794, and already measuring with a practised eye the distances he must overpass before becoming master of Italy.  To these advantages for a war of invasion, Bonaparte united an inborn genius, and clearly established principles, the fruits of an enlightened theory.”

Jomini doubtless may be considered somewhat too absolute and pedantic in his insistence upon definite formulation of principles; but in these words is nevertheless to be recognized the fundamental difference between these two great warriors, a difference by which the seaman was heavily handicapped in the opening of his career.  As time passed on, responsibility, the best of educators, took under her firm and steady guidance the training of his yet undeveloped genius,