t their falling into the hands of the
revolutionists,--a step for which he was severely, but apparently
unjustly, censured by Nelson. The peasantry and the lower orders of
the city took up arms, under the guidance of their priests, and for
some time sought, with rude but undisciplined fury, to oppose the
advance of the enemy; but such untrained resistance was futile before
the veterans of France, and on the 23d of January, 1799, Championnet's
troops entered the city. This was followed by the establishment of the
Parthenopeian Republic, a name which reflected the prevailing French
affectation of antiquity. For all this Nelson blamed the Emperor, and
formed gloomy forebodings. "Had the war commenced in September or
October," he had written amid the December disasters, "all Italy would
at this moment have been liberated. Six months hence, when the
Neapolitan Republic will be organized, armed, and with its numerous
resources called forth, I will suffer to have my head cut off, if the
Emperor is not only defeated in Italy, but that he totters on his
throne in Vienna." To this text he stuck. Three months later, when the
preparations of Austria and Russia were complete, he wrote: "The
French have made war upon the Emperor, and have surprised some of his
troops. Serve him right! why did he not go to war before?" But the
rapid, continuous, and overwhelming successes of the Coalition,
between April and August, showed how untimely had been the step he had
urged upon the King of the Sicilies, disregardful of the needed
preparations and of the most favorable season--February to August--for
operations in Italy. Naples never recovered such political equilibrium
as she had possessed before that ill-advised advance. In Nelson's
career it, and its reverses, were to the Battle of the Nile what
Teneriffe was to St. Vincent; and it illustrates the inadequacy to
success of merely "going ahead," unless both time and method are
dictated by that martial intelligence which Nelson so abundantly
possessed, but in this case failed to use.

Not in Naples only did fortune now administer to him rebuffs, which
seemed singularly to rebuke the change of direction and of base which
he had been persuaded to give to his personal efforts. Immediately
upon his arrival in Palermo, he heard from St. Vincent that a
comparatively junior captain, Sir Sidney Smith, had been sent out by
the Cabinet, bearing, besides his naval commission from the Admiralty,
one from