The project was gigantic, the force prodigious, and though the quarter-master-general Meyer, seeing the vice of the military plan, resigned his situation, and that Meerfelt quarrelled with the archduke Charles, the general feeling was high and sanguine; and the princes of the empire were, with the exception of Wirtemberg and Westphalia, thought to be rather favourable towards the Austrians. But all the contributions were in kind; Austria had only a depreciated paper currency which would not serve her beyond her own frontiers; wherefore England, at that time the paymaster of all Europe, was looked to. England, however, had no ambassador, no regular accredited agent at Vienna; all this mighty armament and plan were carried on without her aid, almost without her knowledge; and a despatch from the Foreign Office, dated the 8th of December, but which only arrived the 10th of March, _refused all aid whatsoever! and even endeavoured to prove that Austria could not want, and England was not in a situation to grant_. Yet this was the period in which such lavish grants had been made to Spain without any condition—so lavish, that, in Cadiz, nearly four hundred thousand pounds, received from England, was lying untouched by the Spaniards. They were absolutely glutted with specie, for they had, at that moment, of their own money, and lying idle in their treasury, _fourteen millions of dollars_, and _ten millions more were on the way from Vera Cruz and Buenes Ayres_. Such was the wisdom, such the providence of the English ministers! heaping money upon money at Cadiz, where it was not wanted, and if it had been wanted, ill bestowed; but refusing it to Austria to forward the explosion of the enormous mine prepared against Napoleon in Germany and Italy. Their agent, Mr. Frere, absolutely refused even to ask for a loan of some of this money from the Spaniards. This is what the reviewer, wilfully perverting my expression, namely, ‘_awakened the dormant spirit of coalitions_,’ calls ‘_the forming a combination of the states of Europe_!’ The English ministers were treated as mere purse-bearers, to be bullied or cajoled as the case might be; and in these two instances, not without reason, for they neither know how to give nor how to refuse in the right time or place. Nor were their military dispositions better arranged, as we shall presently see.