he formal traditions of a century and the battle-line of the Comte de
Grasse lived through and shared in the glories of this decade of victory. A
new spirit had come into the navy. An English admiral would no longer think
he had done his duty in merely bringing his well-ordered line into
cannon-shot of an enemy's array and exchanging broadsides with him at
half-cannon range. Nor was the occupation of a port or an island recognized
as an adequate result for a naval campaign. The enemy's fighting-fleet was
now the object aimed at. It was not merely to be brought to action, and
more or less damaged by distant cannonading. The ideal battle was the close
fight amid the enemy's broken line, and victory meant his destruction.

The spirit of the time was personified in its greatest sailor. Nelson's
battles were fought in grim earnest, taking risks boldly in order to secure
great results. Trafalgar--the last of his battles, and the last great
battle of the days of the sail--was also the final episode in the long
struggle of Republican and Imperial France to snatch from England even for
a while the command of the sea.

When Napoleon assembled the Grand Army at Boulogne, gave it the official
title of the "_Armee d'Angleterre_," and crowded every creek from Dunkirk
to Havre with flat-bottomed boats for its transport across the Channel, he
quite realized that the first condition of success for the scheme was that
a French fleet should be in possession of the Channel at the moment his
veterans embarked for their short voyage. He had twenty sail of the line,
under Admiral Ganteaume, at Brest; twelve under Villeneuve at Toulon; a
squadron of five at Rochefort under Admiral Missiessy; five more at Ferrol;
and in this last port and at Cadiz and Cartagena there were other ships
belonging to his Spanish allies. But every port was watched by English
battleships and cruisers. The vigilant blockade had been kept up for two
years, during which Nelson, who was watching Toulon, had hardly been an
hour absent from his flagship, the "Victory"; and Collingwood, in the
"Royal Sovereign," did not anchor once in twenty-two months of alternate
cruising and lying to.

Napoleon's mind was ceaselessly busy with plans for moving his fleets on
the sea as he moved army corps on land, so as to elude, mislead, and
out-manoeuvre the English squadrons, and suddenly bring a concentrated
French force of overwhelming strength into the narrow seas. The first move
i