Our good admirals are such bad generals that there is little hope of doing more than being made prisoners on the best terms. We shall form three plans, or as many as there are admirals, and to these mine will be added. From all--perhaps all bad--a worse will be concocted, and of course will fail. We failed at Craney Island because two admirals and a general commanded; and a republic of commanders means defeat. I have seen enough to refuse a joint command if it is offered to me; it is certain disgrace and failure from the nature of things; the two services are incompatible. A navy officer steps on shore and his zeal, his courage, and his ignorance of troops make him think you are timid. A general in a blue coat, or an admiral in a red one is mischief. Cockburn thinks himself a Wellington, and Beckwith is sure the navy never produced such an admiral as himself--between them we got beaten at Craney. When to this divided command it is added that the plan of operations had been in a great measure conceived by the sapient wisdom of Mr. John Wilson Croker, the Secretary of the Admiralty, and embraced a proposal from that authority to send a frigate to act on the Canadian lakes above the Falls of Niagara, any surprise at ultimate failure will be lessened. From the Chesapeake Napier moved in September, 1813, to Halifax, and shortly after he arranged an exchange into his old regiment, the Fiftieth, then engaged in the Pyrenees. He had now been on active service for nearly five years. He had seen war in almost every phase. Though a young man he was an old soldier; several times wounded, once a prisoner, struck at by disease, weakened by the fevers of the Guadiana, he was here in his thirty-second year as keen for active service as when, fifteen years earlier, he had set out from Celbridge to begin a soldier's career. It is curious to note in his writings how little the nature of the man had changed through all this rough lesson of life. The kings of his childhood still wear their crowns; the love of mother and home are still fresh and bright in his heart; his hatred of tyranny, and contempt of fools are as strong as ever; the thirst for military glory is unquenched; but one feeling has steadily grown and increased during all these years of toil and war and travel--it is his admiration for the man he was fighting against. "From first to last," says William Napier, "the great Napoleon was a wonder to him. Early in life, deceived by the systematic vilification of that astounding genius, he felt personal hatred ... but his sagacity soon pierced through prejudice, and the Emperor's capacity created astonishment, which increased when his own experience as a commander and ruler enabled him to estimate the difficulties besetting those stations, and then also he could better appreciate the frantic vituperation of enemies." We find this feeling of