Czartoryski, not by the backwardness of Villeneuve. It was not contrived to scatter dust in the eyes of Europe and to screen discomfiture, but to resist attack. It is not safe to say positively that Napoleon had no means of getting at England. She was saved, as it is the way with islands, by a change in the wind, such as determined her history in 1588, 1688, and 1798. If a man like De Ruyter or Farragut had been in Villeneuve's place when Magon, in a fury, flung his wig into the sea, the landing in Kent would have come into measurable distance. So indeed it would have been if the Institute had not laughed at the crazy projector who came with a plan to give Napoleon the empire over sea and land — the plan of a steamboat. Nobody reading the account of Moore's expedition would gather that it was a disastrous failure. Rather it would seem that the thwarted and disconcerted combatant was Napoleon. "He had missed his mark, and professed to receive information which showed him that he was urgently needed in Paris." The information he had received concerned the material fact that Austria was again arming to attack him. Metternich had gone over to the war party on 4th December. "He would have made short work," wrote Lord Grey, "if he had not been called off by Austria."
In the campaign of 1815 the American is superior both in fulness and fidelity to the Englishman. He cherishes the forlorn hope of justifying the orders to Grouchy, and he makes the absence of Davout too prominent, for Napoleon purposely rejected the four best generals in France ; but he shows that the plan which so nearly succeeded was not foiled by the skill of the allies. Mr. Seeley esteems that victory was out of the question, that the emperor was incapacitated for war, that Waterloo was won, as Marmont said, by the English alone, whose advance decided the victory. Not a word of Bülow's disproportionate loss, of Ziethen's timely arrival, of the sight seen by Colonel Reiche when he came upon the field and was told both by Müffling and Scharnhorst that the French were gaining the day. The English generals
