the wounded Spaniards on shore to be cured in their own country, merely taking their parole that they would not serve again during the war:  and the governor of Cadiz, with still more romantic generosity, offered his hospitals for the use of Collingwood’s wounded seamen, pledging the honour of the Spanish name that they should be cared for like his own men, and sent back to their admiral whenever they had recovered.  It will appear, hereafter, what illustrious consequences the kindly feelings thus manifested were destined to produce.

Buonaparte, when he heard of this mighty discomfiture, which for ever put an end to all his visions of invading England, is said to have lost that possession of himself, which he certainly maintained when the catastrophe of Aboukir was announced to him at Cairo.  Yet arrogance mingled strangely in his expressions of sorrow.—­“I cannot be everywhere,” said he to the messenger of the evil tidings—­as if Napoleon could have had any more chance of producing victory by his presence at Trafalgar, than Nelson would have dreamed of having by appearing on horseback at Marengo.  In his newspapers, and even in his formal messages to the senate at Paris, Buonaparte always persisted in denying that there had been a great defeat at Trafalgar, or even a great battle.  But how well he appreciated the facts of the case was well known to the unfortunate Admiral Villeneuve.  That brave officer, after spending a short time in England, was permitted to return to France on his parole.  He died almost immediately afterwards at Rennes:  whether by his own hand, in the agony of despair, as the French Gazette asserted, or assassinated, as was commonly believed at the time, by some of the blood-hardened minions of Fouche’s police, is a mystery not yet cleared up; and, perhaps, never destined to be so until the day comes in which nothing shall be hid.

The tidings of Trafalgar, after the first moment, served but as a new stimulus to the fire of Napoleon’s energy.  He quitted Vienna, and put himself at the head of his columns, which, passing the Danube into Moravia, soon found themselves within reach of the forces of Russia and Austria, at length combined, and prepared for action, under the eyes of their respective emperors.  These princes, on the approach of the French, drew back as far as Olmutz, in order that a reserve of Russians, under Bexhowden, might join them before the decisive struggle took place.  Napoleon fixed his headquarters at Brunn, and, riding over the plain between Brunn and Austerlitz (a village about two miles from that town), said to his generals, “study this field—­we shall, ere long, have to contest it.”