abinet Ministers, although the most have passed away
unnoted. It was in one of them that he uttered a military opinion, for
whose preservation we are indebted to his own mention of it in a
private letter; an opinion so characteristic of his habits of thought,
his reasoned motives of action, that, although it has before been
quoted, it is fitting to repeat it in his own words and in full.

When he reached England, the naval situation, as far as then known,
was that Napoleon had twenty-one French ships-of-the-line in Brest,
and twenty-eight or nine, French and Spanish, in Ferrol; while
Cornwallis had thirty-five British off Brest. This was the condition
on the 15th of August, when Nelson parted from the fleet off Ushant.
Very soon after his arrival in town, news was received that Villeneuve
had gone to sea from Ferrol, and that Cornwallis, when informed of the
fact, had divided his fleet, with great lack of judgment, keeping
himself seventeen ships to confront the Brest squadron, while eighteen
were sent to look for Villeneuve under the command of Admiral Calder.
In the public discontent with the latter, it was not reassuring to
know that, at a moment when every one's nerves were on the rack, he
was again intrusted with the always difficult task of coping with a
much superior force. While this state of excitement prevailed, Nelson
called upon the Secretary of State, Lord Castlereagh, on the 23d of
August. "Yesterday," he wrote to Captain Keats, "the Secretary of
State, which is a man who has only sat one solitary day in his office,
and of course knows but little of what is passed, and indeed the
Minister,[112] were all full of the enemy's fleet, and as I am now set
up for a _Conjuror_, and God knows they will very soon find out I am
far from being one, I was asked my opinion, against my inclination,
for if I make one wrong guess the charm will be broken; but this I
ventured without any fear, that if Calder got close alongside their
twenty-seven or twenty-eight sail, that by the time the enemy had beat
our fleet soundly, they would do us no harm this year."

This acute perception of the reason why it was at times desirable and
proper to hurl a smaller though more efficient force against superior
numbers, content that the latter, as a factor, were for the campaign
annihilated,--this realization of the possible fruitfulness of a
defeat, or rather, of a battle wisely lost, as contrasted with what
Jomini calls the sterile glo