ad only to 'dictate away,' quite at his
ease, just as he talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's
business to his aide. 'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants
your ideas; let us have your plan.'

The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the
Memoirs. Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish
stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a
complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.

'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet. 'Take a pen. Shut up that
box. We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs. Invasion
can't be done, they say! I tell the doddered asses Napoleon would have
been over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter. Villeneuve had
a fit of paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--that 's as it
happened. And they swear at prestige, won't believe in it, because it's
not fat bacon. I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles, prestige did
half his work for him. It saved him at Essling from a plunge into the
Danube; it saved him at Moskowa; it would have marched him half over
England at his first jump on our shingle beach. But that squelch of fat
citizens should be told--to the devil with them! will they ever learn?
short of a second William!--there were eight-and-forty hours when the
liberty of this country hung wavering in the balance with those Boulogne
boats. Now look at Ulm and Austerlitz. Essling, Wagram; put the victors
in those little affairs to front our awkward squads. The French could
boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player
his hand of cards. Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles?
or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry
numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne-Wimereux camps? We had
nothing but the raw material of courage--pluck, and no science. Ask
any boxing man what he thinks of the chances. The French might have
sacrificed a fleet to land fifty thousand. Our fleet was our one chance.
Any foreign General at the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops
would risk it, and cut an 'entrechat' for joy of the chance. We should
have fought and bled and been marched over--a field of Anglo-Saxon
stubble! and Nelson riding the Channel, undisputed lord o