Prominent among his ideas, and continuous in all his speculations as to the movements of an enemy, from 1795 onward, is the certainty that, for the sake of diversion, Bonaparte will divide his force into two great equal fragments, which may land at points so far apart, and separated by such serious obstacles, as were Solebay and Dover.  Those who will be at the trouble to recall his guesses as to the future movements of the French in the Riviera, Piedmont, and Tuscany, in 1795 and 1796, as well as his own propositions to the Austrians at the same period, will recognize here the recurrence, unchastened by experience or thought, of a theory of warfare it is almost impossible to approve.  That Bonaparte,—­supposed to be master of his first movements,—­if he meant to land in person at Dover, would put half his army ashore at Solebay, is as incredible as that he would have landed one half at Leghorn, meaning to act with the other from the Riviera.  If this criticism be sound, it would show that Nelson, genius as he was, suffered from the lack of that study which reinforces its own conclusions by the experience of others; and that his experience, resting upon service in a navy so superior in quality to its enemies, that great inferiority in number or position could be accepted, had not supplied the necessary corrective to an ill-conceived readiness to sub-divide.

The resultant error is clearly traceable, in the author’s opinion, in his dispositions at Copenhagen, and in a general tendency to allow himself too narrow a margin, based upon an under-valuation of the enemy not far removed from contempt.  It was most fortunate for him, in the Baltic, that Parker increased to twelve the detachment he himself had fixed at ten.  The last utterances of his life, however, show a distinct advance and ripening of the judgment, without the slightest decrease of the heroic resolution that so characterized him.  “I have twenty-three sail with me,” he wrote a fortnight before Trafalgar, “and should they come out I will immediately bring them to battle; ... but I am very, very, very anxious for the arrival of the force which is intended.  It is, as Mr. Pitt knows, annihilation that the country wants, and not merely a splendid victory of twenty-three to thirty-six.  Numbers only can annihilate.”

The assumption that Bonaparte’s plan would be such as he mentioned, naturally controlled Nelson in the dispositions he sketched for the local defence of the shore lines.  The invasion being in two bodies, the defence was to be in two bodies also; nor is there any suggestion of a possibility that these two might be united against one of the enemy’s.  The whole scheme is dual; yet, although the chance of either division of the British being largely inferior to the enemy opposed to it is recognized, the adoption of a central position, or concentration upon either of the enemy’s flotillas, apparently is not contemplated.  Such uncertainty of touch, when not corrected by training,