28 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF L853 chap, men, when they landed, might encounter the IL armies of the hitherto victorious Emperor. But England did not shrink from the undertaking. For more than six years she carried on the struggle, and during some three years of that time she stood alone against Napoleon, for he had put down all the other nations which had sought to resist him, and during that evil time it seemed that the van- quished people of the Continent had no hope left except when they were telling one another in whispers that England remained mistress of the seas, and in the Peninsula was still fighting hard. Times grew better, aud although Bonaparte still held the language of a great potentate, he had so mismanaged the resources of the heroic and war- like country which he ruled, that an English army with its Portuguese auxiliaries was able to invade and hold its territory; and whilst he still pre- tended to the Germans that he was a proud and powerful sovereign, Wellington unmasked the whole imposture of the ' French Empire ' by estab- lishing his army and his foxhounds in the south of France, and quietly hunting the country in the livery of the Salisbury Hunt.* The effort had begun when Sir Arthur Weliesley landed upon the coast of Portugal in the year 1808, and it ended in 1814 In the spring of that last year, men
- Larpent's ' Private Journal at Head-Quarters,' 2d edition,
vol. ii. p. 105. Wellington established himself in France in November 1813. He sent Lack into the Peninsula his whole Spanish army because it plundered. The invasion of France by the Continentnl Powers took place in the beginning of the f dlowing year.
