Such, in broad outline, were the prepossessions and views Nelson took with him from England in 1803, as modified by the information he received upon reaching the station; and such the counter-projects of Bonaparte, to whom belonged, as the privilege of the offensive, the choice of direction for his attack.  The essential difference between the two was, that one believed the invasion of England, however difficult, to be possible, and therefore to be the true and first object of his efforts; while the other, without pronouncing that attempt impossible, saw its difficulties so clearly, that he conceived his enemy must be aiming for the Mediterranean from the beginning.  It is permissible to remark that Bonaparte, after the failure of the invasion, first busied himself in reducing Austria, Prussia, and Russia, successively, to the state of inaction in which they were in 1803; next came to an understanding with the latter, such as Nelson had foreseen; and then turned to the Mediterranean, where he established his own rule in Naples, in the Ionian Islands, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and finally in the Spanish peninsula.  Beyond that his advance was stayed by the Sea Power of Great Britain, which at last wrought his ruin.  Thus in the event the predictions of the British admiral were postponed, but not falsified.

Nelson’s characteristic impatience and energy hurried him on from the moment he took up his command.  “I cannot sail before to-morrow,” he said repeatedly in Portsmouth, “and that’s an age.”  “If the Devil stands at the door,” he tells St. Vincent, “we shall sail to-morrow forenoon.”  The Admiralty, in its primary anxiety about Brest, imposed upon him a delay under which he chafed angrily.  He was directed to meet off that port the squadron of Admiral Cornwallis, in order that, if the latter wanted the “Victory,” she might be left there, and an intimation was even given that he was “on no account to pass Admiral Cornwallis, so as to run any chance of his being deprived of the services of the Victory, if he should judge it necessary to detain her.”  Nelson resented the implication that he was capable of evading an order, like a frigate-captain parting company to better his chance of prize-money.  “I beg to assure you that I hold it impossible for any officer, under such orders as their Lordships’ to me, to designedly miss Admiral Cornwallis off Brest.”

On the 22d of May he was off Ushant, between which and Cornwallis’s rendezvous he passed twenty-four hours, fuming and fretting over a delay that was losing him a fresh, fair, northerly wind; the more so, that he was satisfied Cornwallis neither needed nor wanted the ship.  “From his conduct,”—­not being on his rendezvous,—­“I am clear there can be nothing in Brest to demand his attention.”  On the 23d, however, he could stand it no longer.  “What a wind we are losing!” “If the wisdom of my superiors had not prevented me,” he growled, “at this moment I should have been