When this boastful and triumphant comparison was made, the ruler of France little feared that the refutation of England's inadequacy to cope with his power would be proved within seven years, by her hurling him from the throne, and leading him a captive at her chariot wheels, or that he should end his days in one of her distant colonies, in confinement and obscurity! Buonaparte thus considering the army expelled from Spain as the utmost extent of the means and exertion of the English as a military people, hastily concluded that they could not again appear on the continent. He naturally deduced from this, that the subjection of both Spain and Portugal was the inevitable consequence of his success in Galicia, and that it only required the time necessary for their occupation to secure them under Gallic sway.[26] But how uncertain are the results of human calculation! At the moment when Buonaparte thought the Peninsula at his feet, the seeds of discontent sown by that restless ambition, which was urging him on to his ruin, began to develope themselves in a distant nation. Their growth to maturity was as rapid as opportune, and created a powerful diversion in favour of those countries to the southward suffering under his yoke. The perhaps necessary employment of the French nation, and of the military feeling and spirit grown up since the revolution, which Napoleon fostered, had twice, previously to his invasion of Spain, caused him to direct his conquests against his most powerful military neighbour,—Austria.