d 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 thousand. Our fleet was our one chance. Any foreign General at
the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut
an 'entrechat' for joy of the chance. We should have fought and bled and
been marched over--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble! and Nelson riding the
Channel, undisputed lord of the waters. Heigh! by the Lord, this country
would have been