But the inveterate hostility of Napoleon seemed to rage against England, with the ravening of a mad dog, who dies biting the club which has laid him on the ground. All his anti-English policy was a succession of gross and ruinous blunders. To assail England without a fleet was naturally impossible. To form a fleet for the purpose of assailing her was, therefore, always a new temptation. If, after the First of June, which destroyed the Channel fleet of France, and the burning of the arsenals of Toulon, which destroyed her Mediterranean fleet, France had never built another vessel beyond the tonnage of a coaster, she would have shown her good sense. But Napoleon, when in the plenitude of power, went on building huge vessels, only to see them sent into English ports. The waste of time, waste of thought, and waste of money, on those projects of English invasion, were among the most capital faults of his extravagant career. He might have made France the great corn country, or the great garden of Europe, with half the sums which he threw away only to be beaten. His fifty ships of the line which were to sweep the Channel, in the absence of our fleet--his one hundred and twenty thousand men on the shore of Boulogne--all only enhanced the naval glory of the great commander; who, after pursuing the French flying squadron of eighteen great ships, with ten, to the West Indies, finished in one day the naval war, extinguished the existence of the French and Spanish navies, and crowned his own gallant career. The impolicy of these attempts was equally exhibited in another form--they stimulated at once the power and the spirit of England. The monotony of a war of defence would have disgusted the gallantry of the nation, but the victories of the British navy continually cheered the people under the burdens of the war. What minister could have dared to propose a "compromising" peace, on the day after the battle of the Nile? What minister would have dared to propose any peace on the day after Trafalgar? The war, too, broke down more than the French fleet--it buried the Opposition. The French author divides his history into three periods--the first, that of the battles of Howe and Hood, of Hotham and Bridport; the second, that of Jervis; the third, (from 1798 to 1805) belonging to Nelson, without an equal, without even a competitor--the most glorious series of successes ever won on the ocean.