Napoleon must evidently have miscalculated the degree of energy and promptitude necessary to overcome two such generals as Wellington and Blücher. He sadly underrated the gallant troops which he and his marshal had to combat. And when adverse writers talk so much of the calculating, cautious and methodical Wellington (as Napoleon was pleased to call him,) being taken by surprise in this campaign, we may venture to ask, was not the Emperor taken by surprise and thrown out in all his calculations by the extreme vigilance and energy which brought three corps of the Prussian army, above eighty-five thousand men, into position at Ligny by mid-day on the 16th? and but for an error in the transmission of orders, these troops would also have been joined by Bulow’s corps; and had general Zieten sent information to general Müffling or to the duke of Wellington at Brussels, when the French army in three columns was first seen in his front in advance of Charleroi, the whole allied army might have been concentrated at Quatre-Bras during the night of the 15th. Wellington in person was at Ligny on the 16th; observing Napoleon preparing for battle, and after conferring with Blücher, he returned to Quatre-Bras in time to give a most critical check to the gallant Ney. Was it no surprise to Napoleon to find that Wellington, upon hearing of Blücher’s retreat from Ligny, instead of falling back to Ostend, etc., immediately retired with ominous steadiness upon Mont-St.-Jean? and there arrested the ambition of his opponent, who, instead of being at Brussels early on the 17th, as intimated to Ney, was compelled to open his eyes, on the morning of the 18th, to the fact that he was still above twelve miles from Brussels, and unable to advance a step nearer without fighting a desperate battle, and staking his empire on the result! He did fight: the stake was lost, and, by the next morning, he found himself again at Charleroi, whence he had dispatched his memorable letter to his “cousin” Ney but two days before. He must have felt an agony of _surprise_ and something more, as he fled on for his very life, to escape from his enraged pursuers.