consideration which kept them away from Sicily.

Nelson, instructed by the experience and observation of the recent
past, and by a certain prescient sagacity which was at once native and
cultivated in him, recognized that the Mediterranean, with its immense
indented coast line, its positions of critical importance,--such as
the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bosphorus, Egypt and Malta,--and its
comparatively short water distances, was the field of operations to
which the maritime ambitions of Bonaparte, debarred a wider flight by
the sea-power of Great Britain, must inevitably incline. To this
contributed also its remoteness from England, as well as its nearness
to France and to the ports subject to her influence in Italy and
Spain; while the traditional ambitions of French rulers, for three
centuries back, had aspired to control in the Levant, and had regarded
Turkey for that reason as a natural ally. It was, therefore, not
merely as magnifying his own office, nor yet as the outcome of natural
bias, resulting from long service in its waters, that Nelson saw in
the Mediterranean the region at once for defence and offence against
Bonaparte; where he might be most fatally checked, and where also he
might be induced most surely to steps exhaustive to his strength. This
conviction was, indeed, rather an instance of accurate intuition than
of formulated reasoning. Clear, ample, and repeated, as are his
demonstrations of the importance of the various positions at stake,
and of the measures necessary to be taken, they rather apply to the
necessities of the moment than indicate a wide scheme of policy, which
should divert the energies of the enemy to the South of Europe, and so
provide the best of defences against his projected invasion of
England. Yet even of such broader view tokens are not wanting. "To say
the truth," he writes to the Queen of Naples, "I do not believe we had
in the last war, and, according to all appearance, we shall not have
in the present one either, plans of a sufficiently grand scale to
force France to keep within her proper limits. Small measures produce
only small results. The intelligent mind of your Majesty will readily
comprehend the great things which might be effected in the
Mediterranean. On this side Buonaparte is the most vulnerable. It is
from here that it would be the most easy to mortify his pride, and so
far humble him, as to make him accept reasonable conditions of peace."

It cannot be c