Abroad, we captured St. Lucia, Tobago, Demerara, and Surinam, and the French occupied Hanover, which mattered nothing. But the destruction by Nelson of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar mattered much. It destroyed altogether the idea of a French invasion for more than fifty years. Hence the French idea of invasion was abandoned, and the military camp on the Channel coast was broken up. Napoleon shivered the European alliance against him at Ulm and Austerlitz, and contented himself with abusing England in manifestoes. A British contingent, built up of the Guards, and the 4th, 14th, 23rd, 28th, and 95th Foot, etc., went to Bremen and came back again; but in 1806 a small British army did good work on the coast of Calabria, and met the French at Maida, where the 20th, 27th, 58th, 78th, and 81st Regiments defeated Regnier, and where, if tradition speaks truly, the 20th, who were bathing when the bugle sounded, went into action with only their accoutrements and weapons on. This battle is one of the recorded instances in which the French and English actually crossed bayonets. Almost the last event of interest before the Peninsular War is that of the seizure of the Danish navy, and the military operations that accompanied that probably necessary, but certainly violent, act. When the population and the wealth of Great Britain were infinitely less than they are now, and when, as regards the former, most European nations surpassed us, there is no doubt of the determination of the men of that time. There was no fear of anybody, and that very boldness saved us. It may be well in some cases to be pacific; but Drake’s method of singeing “the King of Spain’s beard,” on the broad principle that there “are two ways of facing an enemy: the one to stand off and cry, ‘Try that again and I will strike thee,’ the other to strike him first and then, ‘Try that at all and I’ll strike thee again,’” has its merits in time of grave peril, and is likely to bear more useful fruit than the method adopted by Mr. Snodgrass at Ipswich, when he, “in a truly Christian spirit, and in order that he might take no one unawares, announced in a very loud tone that he was going to begin.” For right or wrong it was done, and at Kioge Sir Arthur Wellesley met the Danes with the 92nd and 95th, and drove them back on the capital. Soon after the struggle terminated, the Danish fleet was taken away. England for the second time had made an enemy of a State too weak to do other than accept the conditions enforced by a stronger power. The only excuse was the instinct of self-preservation. The only other resource would have been to get Denmark to ally with us. But Denmark inclined to what seemed the strongest, though not the most determined, power, and so doing lost her fleet. * * * * *