When he reached England, the naval situation, as far as then known, was that Napoleon had twenty-one French ships-of-the-line in Brest, and twenty-eight or nine, French and Spanish, in Ferrol; while Cornwallis had thirty-five British off Brest.  This was the condition on the 15th of August, when Nelson parted from the fleet off Ushant.  Very soon after his arrival in town, news was received that Villeneuve had gone to sea from Ferrol, and that Cornwallis, when informed of the fact, had divided his fleet, with great lack of judgment, keeping himself seventeen ships to confront the Brest squadron, while eighteen were sent to look for Villeneuve under the command of Admiral Calder.  In the public discontent with the latter, it was not reassuring to know that, at a moment when every one’s nerves were on the rack, he was again intrusted with the always difficult task of coping with a much superior force.  While this state of excitement prevailed, Nelson called upon the Secretary of State, Lord Castlereagh, on the 23d of August.  “Yesterday,” he wrote to Captain Keats, “the Secretary of State, which is a man who has only sat one solitary day in his office, and of course knows but little of what is passed, and indeed the Minister,[112] were all full of the enemy’s fleet, and as I am now set up for a Conjuror, and God knows they will very soon find out I am far from being one, I was asked my opinion, against my inclination, for if I make one wrong guess the charm will be broken; but this I ventured without any fear, that if Calder got close alongside their twenty-seven or twenty-eight sail, that by the time the enemy had beat our fleet soundly, they would do us no harm this year.”

This acute perception of the reason why it was at times desirable and proper to hurl a smaller though more efficient force against superior numbers, content that the latter, as a factor, were for the campaign annihilated,—­this realization of the possible fruitfulness of a defeat, or rather, of a battle wisely lost, as contrasted with what Jomini calls the sterile glory of fighting battles merely to win them,—­is one of the most marked and decisive features of Nelson’s genius as a general officer.  It recurs over and over again, and at all periods, in his correspondence, this clear and full appreciation of the relation of the parts to the whole.[113] It underlay his sustained purpose during the long pursuit of the preceding months, that, if he found the allied squadron, “they would not part without a battle.”  Whatever else the result, that particular division would do no harm that year, and with it necessarily fell the great combination, whatever that might be, of which it was an essential factor.  “The event would have been in the hands of Providence,” he wrote to Barham; “but we may without, I hope, vanity, believe that the enemy would have been fit for no active service after such a battle.”  There is wanting to the completeness of this admirable impulse only the steadying resolve that he would bide