Ere he had leisure to sun his laurels he was again afloat, and in the first year of the present century he passed the wild and stormy steep of Elsinore. The battle was a Titanic struggle, and giants of the same blood grappled with each other. Equal was the valour, and if our compelled rather than willing foes had the advantage in means of assault the better wisdom was ours, without which prowess is but a flail apt to wound the skull of him who wields it. The battle of the Baltic, so gigantically fought and inimitably won, placed on Nelson’s brow the coronet of a viscount; but he did not quit the Baltic until he had fluttered the Russian fleet at Revel, and, when he returned to give a report of his mission accomplished, England already needed him for the fulfilment of another. Napoleon was at Boulogne, and, with a French army, threatening invasion. What the feeling of the times was in the parsonages on the Sussex coast--is it not written in the letters of Peter Plimley? What Nelson’s feelings were may be divined from that saying of his, that the French might come any way they pleased, but that they should _not_ come by sea! England trusted him, and he kept his word as far as in him lay. If he did not destroy the Boulogne flotilla, he at least demonstrated that it could not issue from harbour without his permission nor put out to sea without being destroyed. Boulogne has, in some degree, benefited by the rough messengers which he flung into the port as visiting cards to intimate that he and his followers were outside. Some hundred weights of good English iron were projected into the town, and out of them are the gaspipes constructed which are now laid down in the Bassa Ville and the suburb of Capecure!