hitherto had saluted and obeyed him only as the first among equals. What
an inconsistency! The splendour and show that accompanied him
everywhere, the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the
decorations of the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he
distributed with bombastic speeches among troops--to whom those political
impositions and social cajoleries were novelties--made such an impression
upon them, that had a bridge been then fixed between Calais and Dover,
brave as your countrymen are, I should have trembled for the liberty and
independence of your country. The heads and imagination of the soldiers,
I know from the best authority, were then so exalted that, though they
might have been cut to pieces, they could never have been defeated or
routed. I pity our children when I reflect that their tranquillity and
happiness will, perhaps, depend upon such a corrupt and unprincipled
people of soldiers,--easy tools in the hands of every impostor or
mountebank.

The lively satisfaction which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle of
grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed
with uneasiness and vexation. Except at Berlin, in all the other great
Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and your
country, of the subjugation of which he had spoken with such lightness
and such inconsideration, instead of dreading, despised his boasts and
defied his threats. Indeed, never before did the Cabinet of St. James
more opportunely expose the reality of his impotency, the impertinence of
his menaces, and the folly of his parade for the invasion of your
country, than by declaring all the ports containing his invincible armada
in a state of blockade. I have heard from an officer who witnessed his
fury when in May, 1799, he was compelled to retreat from before St. Jean
d'Acre, and who was by his side in the camp at Boulogne when a despatch
informed him of this circumstance, that it was nothing compared to the