he kindly feelings thus manifested were destined to
produce.

Buonaparte, when he heard of this mighty discomfiture, which for ever
put an end to all his visions of invading England, is said to have lost
that possession of himself, which he certainly maintained when the
catastrophe of Aboukir was announced to him at Cairo. Yet arrogance
mingled strangely in his expressions of sorrow.--"I cannot be
everywhere," said he to the messenger of the evil tidings--as if
Napoleon could have had any more chance of producing victory by his
presence at Trafalgar, than Nelson would have dreamed of having by
appearing on horseback at Marengo. In his newspapers, and even in his
formal messages to the senate at Paris, Buonaparte always persisted in
denying that there had been a great defeat at Trafalgar, or even a great
battle. But how well he appreciated the facts of the case was well known
to the unfortunate Admiral Villeneuve. That brave officer, after
spending a short time in England, was permitted to return to France on
his parole. He died almost immediately afterwards at Rennes: whether by
his own hand, in the agony of despair, as the French _Gazette_ asserted,
or assassinated, as was commonly believed at the time, by some of the
blood-hardened minions of Fouche's police, is a mystery not yet cleared
up; and, perhaps, never destined to be so until the day comes in which
nothing shall be hid.

The tidings of Trafalgar, after the first moment, served but as a new
stimulus to the fire of Napoleon's energy. He quitted Vienna, and put
himself at the head of his columns, which, passing the Danube into
Moravia, soon found themselves within reach of the forces of Russia and
Austria, at length combined, and prepared for action, under the eyes of
their respective emperors. These princes, on the approach of the French,
drew back as far as Olmutz, in order that a reserve of Russians, under
Bexhowden, might join them before the decisive struggle took place.
Napoleon fixed his headquarters at _Brunn_, and, riding over the plain
between Brunn and Austerlitz (a village about two miles from that town),
said to his generals, "study this field--we shall, ere long, have to
contest it."

Buonaparte has been much criticised by strategists for the rashness of
thus passing the Danube into Moravia, while the Archduke Ferdinand was
organising the Bohemians on his left, the Archdukes Charles and John in
Hungary, with still formidable and daily increasing