ty of
1814.

[Sidenote: Return of Napoleon.]

The close of the war with the United States freed England's hands at a
moment when the reappearance of Napoleon at Paris called her to a new
and final struggle with France. By treaty with the Allied Powers
Napoleon had been suffered to retain a fragment of his former
empire--the island of Elba off the coast of Tuscany; and from Elba he
looked on at the quarrels which sprang up between his conquerors as soon
as they gathered at Vienna to complete the settlement of Europe. The
most formidable of these quarrels arose from a claim of Prussia to annex
Saxony and that of Russia to annex Poland; but their union for this
purpose was met by a counter-league of England and Austria with their
old enemy, France, whose ambassador, Talleyrand, laboured vigorously to
bring the question to an issue by force of arms. At the moment, however,
when a war between the two leagues seemed close at hand, Napoleon landed
on the coast near Cannes, and, followed only by a thousand of his
guards, marched over the mountains of Dauphine upon Grenoble and Lyons.
He counted, and counted justly, on the indifference of the country to
its new Bourbon rulers, on the longing of the army for a fresh struggle
which should restore its glory, and above all on the spell of his name
over soldiers whom he had so often led to victory. In twenty days from
his landing he reached the Tuileries unopposed, while Lewis the
Eighteenth fled helplessly to Ghent. But whatever hopes he had drawn
from the divisions of the Allied Powers were at once dispelled by their
resolute action on the news of his descent upon France. Their strife was
hushed and their old union restored by the consciousness of a common
danger. An engagement to supply a million of men for the purposes of the
war, and a recall of their armies to the Rhine, answered Napoleon's
efforts to open negotiations with the Powers.

England furnished subsidies to the amount of eleven millions, and
hastened to place an army on the frontier of the Netherlands. The best
troops of the force which had been employed in the Peninsula however
were still across the Atlantic; and of the eighty thousand men who
gathered round Wellington only about half were Englishmen, the rest
mainly raw levies from Belgium and Hanover. The Duke's plan was to unite
with the one hundred and fifty thousand Prussians under Marshal Bluecher
who were advancing on the Lower Rhine, and to enter France by