altogether too
complicated to be hazarded except as a last desperate venture. In a
report to the Government (February 23rd) he thus sums up the whole
situation:

"Whatever efforts we make, we shall not for some years gain the
naval supremacy. To invade England without that supremacy is the
most daring and difficult task ever undertaken.... If, having
regard to the present organization of our navy, it seems impossible
to gain the necessary promptness of execution, then we must really
give up the expedition against England, _be satisfied with keeping
up the pretence of it_, and concentrate all our attention and
resources on the Rhine, in order to try to deprive England of
Hanover and Hamburg:[93] ... or else undertake an eastern
expedition which would menace her trade with the Indies. And if
none of these three operations is practicable, I see nothing else
for it but to conclude peace with England."

The greater part of his career serves as a commentary on these
designs. To one or other of them he was constantly turning as
alternative schemes for the subjugation of his most redoubtable foe.
The first plan he now judged to be impracticable; the second, which
appears later in its fully matured form as his Continental System, was
not for the present feasible, because France was about to settle
German affairs at the Congress of Rastadt; to the third he therefore
turned the whole force of his genius.

The conquest of Egypt and the restoration to France of her supremacy
in India appealed to both sides of Bonaparte's nature. The vision of
the tricolour floating above the minarets of Cairo and the palace of
the Great Mogul at Delhi fascinated a mind in which the mysticism of
the south was curiously blent with the practicality and passion for
details that characterize the northern races. To very few men in the
world's history has it been granted to dream grandiose dreams and all
but realize them, to use by turns the telescope and the microscope of
political survey, to plan vast combinations of force, and yet to
supervise with infinite care the adjustment of every adjunct. Caesar,
in the old world, was possibly the mental peer of Bonaparte in this
majestic equipoise of the imaginative and practical qualities; but of
Caesar we know comparatively little; whereas the complex workings of
the greatest mind of the modern world stand revealed in that
storehouse of facts and f