The short peace is over. War with France has been declared. Pitt is again in Downing Street, busy at fresh coalitions, borrowing his half hundred millions a year and scattering them broadcast over Europe, chafing and raging when he looks at the Horse Guards close by, and longing to be able to infuse something of his own spirit into that establishment, yet all the while obliged to put a good face on it and pretend that he thinks the King's generals are as good as any in Europe. When he gets back to his house at Putney he half forgets his worries, and can even laugh at the feeble tools he has to work with. Here is a little glimpse given us by William Napier in this year, 1804, into Pitt's personal experience of some of the commanding officers who at this time were holding the south coast of England in hourly anticipation of a French descent from Boulogne, where Bonaparte and his Grand Army were encamped almost within sight of the Kentish shore. Pitt has come home to Putney, as usual very fagged and tired after the day's work in Downing Street. He drinks half a dozen glasses of port quickly one after the other, his strength and spirits revive with the stimulant, and then he relates the exciting events of the day. A Cabinet Council is going on. At any moment news may come that the enemy is in Kent or Sussex. Anxiety is strained to fever pitch. Suddenly a dragoon is heard thundering up the narrow street; it is a despatch from the south. The man has ridden in hot haste. The packet is addressed to the Prime Minister. Amid breathless expectation Pitt opens the despatch. A night-cap tumbles out! Is it some stupid hoax? Not at all. One of the ministers has been spending a day or two at the military headquarters on the south coast; he has forgotten his night-cap, and the general, with a keen eye to the importance of ministerial interest, has sent a mounted express bearing the lost head-gear to its owner! Another evening the Prime Minister tells them that he had that day received a despatch announcing the landing of French troops from two ships at three different parts of the coast! As may be supposed, from these and other instances of military sagacity, the Napier estimate of our generals was at this period not a high one. "It is d----d easy to be a general," we find William writing in 1807; and three years earlier Charles tells us that "most of our generals are more obliged to the Duke of York than to the Deity for their military talents." But perhaps the most absurd instance of the state of military command in England at that time is to be found in a letter written by a general officer very high in command to a notorious lady of the period,[1] in which, describing his inspection of the army cantoned between Dover and Hastings, he tells his correspondent that "from Folkestone he had had a good view of the enemy's works at Boulogne"--an instance of far-sighted reconnaissance not easily to be paralleled in the annals of war. It is really difficult