ous time;" but
it is difficult to understand why he imagined that the French would
transfer their army into the destitution of the Corsican mountains
from the fertile plains of Lombardy, abandoning the latter to their
enemy, and exchanging their assured communications with France for the
uncertainties and irregularities of a water transit over seas
commanded by the British fleet. The tenure of the island, as he well
knew, depended upon the willing support of the Corsicans themselves;
in the equal balance of the existing war, neither belligerent could
maintain its control against the opposition of the natives.

This anticipation, in its disregard of the perfectly obvious
conditions, was scarcely worthy of Nelson's real native sagacity, and
shows clearly how much a man, even of genius, is hampered in the
conclusions of actual life by the lack of that systematic ordering and
training of the ideas which it is the part of education to supply.
Genius is one thing, the acquirements of an
accomplished--instructed--officer are another, yet there is between
the two nothing incompatible, rather the reverse; and when to the
former, which nature alone can give,--and to Nelson did give,--is
added the conscious recognition of principles, the practised habit of
viewing, under their clear light, all the circumstances of a
situation, assigning to each its due weight and relative importance,
then, and then only, is the highest plane of military greatness
attained. Whether in natural insight Nelson fell short of Napoleon's
measure need not here be considered; that he was at this time far
inferior, in the powers of a trained intellect, to his younger
competitor in the race for fame, is manifest by the readiness with
which he accepted such widely ex-centric conjectures as that of an
attempt by sea upon Leghorn at the opening of the campaign, and now
upon Corsica by a great part, if not the whole, of the army of Italy.

"On the side of the French," says Jomini, speaking of Bonaparte at
this very period, "was to be seen a young warrior, trained in the best
schools, endowed with an ardent imagination, brought up upon the
examples of antiquity, greedy of glory and of power, knowing
thoroughly the Apennines, in which he had distinguished himself in
1794, and already measuring with a practised eye the distances he must
overpass before becoming master of Italy. To these advantages for a
war of invasion, Bonaparte united an inborn genius, and clea