s there were not less than 350,000 in arms.

Soult, Ney, Davoust, and Victor were in command of the army designed to
invade England, and the Chief Consul personally repaired to Boulogne,
and inspected both the troops and the flotilla. He constantly gave out
that it was his fixed purpose to make his attempt by means of the
flotilla alone; but while he thus endeavoured to inspire his enemy with
false security (for Nelson had declared this scheme of a boat invasion
to be _mad_, and staked his whole reputation on its miserable and
immediate failure, if attempted), the Consul was in fact providing
indefatigably a fleet of men-of-war, designed to protect and cover the
voyage. These ships were preparing in different ports of France and
Spain, to the number of fifty; Buonaparte intended them to steal out to
sea individually or in small squadrons, rendezvous at Martinico, and,
returning thence in a body, sweep the Channel free of the English for
such a space of time at least as might suffice for the execution of his
great purpose. These designs, however, were from day to day thwarted by
the watchful zeal of Nelson and the other English admirals; who observed
Brest, Toulon, Genoa, and the harbours of Spain so closely, that no
squadron, nor hardly a single vessel, could force a passage to the
Atlantic.

Napoleon persisted to the end of his life in asserting his belief that
the invasion of England was prevented merely by a few unforeseen
accidents, and that, had his generals passed the sea, they must have
been successful. The accidents to which he attributed so much influence,
were, it is to be supposed, the presence and zeal of Nelson, Pellew,
Cornwallis, and their respective fleets of observation. As for the
results of the expedition, if the Channel had once been
crossed--Napoleon never seemed to doubt that a single great battle would
have sufficed to place London in his hands. Once arrived in the capital,
he would, he said, have summoned a convention, restored the mass of the
English people to their proper share of political power,--in a word,
banished the King, and revolutionised England on the model of France:
the meaning of all which is--reduced this island to be a province of the
French empire, and yet bestowed upon its people all those rights and
liberties of which he had already removed the last shadow, wherever his
own power was established on the continent.

There can be little doubt that Napoleon egregiously underrate