He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him seize the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of it.  ‘Capua’ was mentioned; she brought in ‘a siren,’ too.  Her brother was to be the soldier again—­fling off silken bonds.  The world might prate of his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism, casting aside his just anger, and backing his chief’s opinion.  ’A good chance to get their names together.’  To her brother she declared that the columns of the leading journal were open to him—­’in large type’; he was to take her word for it; he had only to ‘dictate away,’ quite at his ease, just as he talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe’s business to his aide.  ‘Lose no time,’ she concluded; ’the country wants your ideas; let us have your plan.’

The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the Memoirs.  Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.

‘Ay, be the porker sow it’s getting liker and liker to every year!’ Lord Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet.  ’Take a pen.  Shut up that box.  We’ll give ’em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs.  Invasion can’t be done, they say!  I tell the doddered asses Napoleon would have been over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter.  Villeneuve had a fit of paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson—­that ’s as it happened.  And they swear at prestige, won’t believe in it, because it’s not fat bacon.  I tell them, after Napoleon’s first battles, prestige did half his work for him.  It saved him at Essling from a plunge into the Danube; it saved him at Moskowa; it would have marched him half over England at his first jump on our shingle beach.  But that squelch of fat citizens should be told—­to the devil with them! will they ever learn? short of a second William!—­there were eight-and-forty hours when the liberty of this country hung wavering in the balance with those Boulogne boats.  Now look at Ulm and Austerlitz.  Essling, Wagram; put the victors in those little affairs to front our awkward squads.  The French could boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player his hand of cards.  Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles? or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne-Wimereux camps?  We had nothing but the raw material of courage—­pluck, and no science.  Ask any boxing man what he thinks of the chances.  The French might have sacrificed a fleet to land fifty