Napoleon, after his first successes near Ratisbon, entered Vienna, and attempted to carry the war to the left bank of the Danube; but a severe check, received at the battle of Esling on the 21st of May, so shook his moral ascendancy in Europe, that he deemed it necessary to concentrate all the disposable strength of his empire for one gigantic effort, which should restore the terror of his name. The appearance of inactivity assumed by him, while thus mightily gathering his forces, deceived his enemies; and, as their hopes rose, their boasts became extravagant, more especially in England, where, to express a doubt of his immediate overthrow was regarded as a heinous offence; and where the government, buoyed up with foolish expectations, thought less of supporting a noble and effectual warfare in Portugal than of nourishing and aiding the secondary and rather degrading hostility of conspirators, malcontents, and military adventurers in Germany. [Sidenote: Adjutant-general’s Returns.] While sir Arthur Wellesley was waiting impatiently on the Tagus for the scanty reinforcements afforded him, two other armies were simultaneously preparing to act against the extremities of the French empire; the one, consisting of about twelve thousand men, drawn from Sicily, was destined to invade Italy, the southern parts of which had been denuded of troops to oppose the Austrians on the Tagliamento. The other was assembled on the coast of England, where above forty thousand of the finest troops the nation could boast of, and a fleet of power to overthrow all the other navies of the world combined, composed an armament, intended to destroy the great marine establishment which the French emperor had so suddenly and so portentously created at Antwerp. So vast an expedition had never before left the British shores; neither any one so meanly conceived, so improvidently arranged, so calamitously conducted, for the marine and land forces, combined, numbered more than eighty thousand fighting men, and those of the bravest; yet the object in view was comparatively insignificant, and even that was not obtained. Delivered over to the leading of a man, whose military incapacity has caused the glorious title of Chatham to be scorned, this ill-fated army, with spirit, and strength, and zeal to have spread the fame of England to the extremities of the earth, perished, without a blow, in the pestilent marshes of Walcheren! And so utterly had party spirit stifled the feeling of national honour that public men were found base enough to reprobate the convention of Cintra, to sneer at sir John Moore’s operations, and yet to declare the Walcheren expedition wise, profitable, and even glorious!