with Great Britain, should have been to place a large body of troops in a position he once considered so exposed, shows the fulness of his conviction that upon the Continent he had, for the moment, nothing to fear from the other Great Powers.  Strongly stirred as they had been by his highhanded aggressions, none as yet ventured to call him directly to account.  Great Britain, the least immediately affected, had stepped into the lists, and demanded not only that aggression should cease, but that the state of the Continent should be restored as it existed when she signed the treaty of Amiens.  With this requirement she maintained the war, single-handed, from May, 1803, to the autumn of 1805.

It was not without reason that Bonaparte reckoned upon the inaction of the Continent.  Austria, although profoundly discontented by much he had done since the peace of Luneville, in 1801, was too thoroughly disheartened and exhausted by the unsuccessful and protracted struggle which preceded it, to be ready to renew the strife.  Limited as she now was, by the treaty, to the eastern bank of the Adige, there was in Northern Italy no force to threaten the French communications, between their divisions in the valley of the Po and the one at the heel of the peninsula.  Prussia, playing a double part for years back, seeking from day to day the favor of the most powerful, was wholly committed for the time to the First Consul; while Russia, although her youthful sovereign had abandoned the anti-British policy of his predecessor, remained undecided as to the general course she should pursue amid the ever-shifting perplexities of the day.  Less fantastic in imagination than his insane father, Alexander I. inherited a visionary tendency, which hindered practical action, and showed itself in plans too vast and complicated for realization, even when two rulers of the overwhelming power of himself and Napoleon, at a later date, set their hands to the task.  Swayed, alternately, by sympathy with the ancient order of things, which Great Britain for the moment represented, and by prospects of Russian aggrandizement, which Bonaparte dangled before his eyes, the Czar halted between two opinions, pleasing himself, meanwhile, in weaving, with associates of his own age, schemes for a general reorganization of Europe.  In these the interests of Russia naturally, and quite properly, had a leading part, and not least in those seas and regions that fell within the limits of Nelson’s command.

The power of the great states which lay to the northward and eastward of him being thus neutralized, Bonaparte found upon the land nothing to oppose his will, or to contest his influence, in the smaller and weaker nations to the southward and westward, close to his own doors, but isolated from the rest of Europe, except by sea—­a weighty exception.  Spain, reduced to virtual vassalage in the previous war, no longer even pretended to dispute his orders.  She was not engaged in the present hostilities, simply