Like Great Britain herself during this repose, he rested with his arms at his side, ready for a call.

The Prime Minister, Addington, has transmitted a curious story of the manner in which he exemplified his ideas of the proper mode of negotiating with Bonaparte.

"It matters not at all," he said, taking up a poker, "in what way I lay this poker on the floor.

But if Bonaparte should say it _must_ be placed in this direction," suiting the action to the word, "we must instantly insist upon its being laid in some other one." At the same time Bonaparte, across the Channel, was illustrating in almost identical phrase the indomitable energy that was common to these two men, the exponents of the two opposing and irreconcilable tendencies of their age.

"If the British ministry should intimate that there was anything the First Consul had not done, because he was prevented from doing it, that instant he would do it." "You have proved yourself too true a prophet," wrote an occasional correspondent to Nelson, "for you have said ever since the peace that it could not be of long duration." Jar after jar, as Bonaparte drove his triumphal chariot over the prostrate continent, announced the instability of existing conditions; and the speech from the throne on the 16th of November, 1802, was distinctly ominous, if vague.