crept slowly towards the enemy—they must have looked like moving thunder-clouds. Lord Nelson's famous signal, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ was spelled out in little flags from the mast of his great ship the Victory. And every man did. Almost the whole French and Spanish fleets were there destroyed or taken prisoners. No such victory had been won at sea since the Greeks beat the Persians at Salamis nearly five hundred years before Christ. Nelson was killed in the battle; but the plan of invasion was over and Napoleon never resumed it. The French Navy hardly recovered from this defeat before our own days. You can see the Victory still moored in Portsmouth harbour, and can go into the little dark cabin in which Nelson died, happy in spite of mortal pain, because he just lived long enough to hear of England's triumph.
French victories on the Continent, 1805–9.The remaining colonies of France and her allies were gradually conquered during the next ten years. But at first this seemed to help little towards freeing the continent of Europe, which, by 1807, France had subdued right up to the Russian frontier. Prussia had been beaten to pieces in 1806; Austria, which, on the whole, had been the most steady of Napoleon's enemies, was beaten for the third time in 1809, and was half inclined to make an alliance with him; but by that time Napoleon had run his head against something which was going to destroy him.
Napoleon attacks Spain, 1808.Much the worst governed, most ignorant, most backward nation in Europe, was Spain. Napoleon thought it would be easy to put one of his brothers on the throne of Spain, and one of his generals on the throne of Portugal. Spain was, besides, the oldest ally of France; but when Napoleon tried this plan in 1808, she became