storm is over we out with them again, and so should the State do.


The truth was that, in much, Collingwood was a more able diplomatist than
the men by whose authority he was circumscribed. His letters to Stanhope
prove that he was a more apt tactician and had a profounder grasp of the
political situation of his day than he has been credited with by
posterity. Again and again, does he foretell that a particular line of
action will be fraught with a particular result, or show how his
representations had been ignored until, too late, events had proved their
accuracy. Again and again, in some apparently trivial situation which he
had the insight to recognise was big with import, did his tactfulness
avert catastrophe which a lesser man would have hastened. "I have always
found that kind language and strong ships have a very powerful effect in
conciliating the people," he says in one letter to Stanhope, with dry
humour. And meanwhile the incompetency of many of those with whom he had
to work in alliance was a further source of trial to him. Only too
shrewdly did he recognise wherein lay the efficiency of Napoleon and the
incapacity of his opponents.


_October 7th, 1809._

Should the Austrians make their peace, which I am convinced they must,
the next object of Bonaparte will be Turkey, and probably the
Austrians be engaged to assist him in the reduction of it. All the
south part of Europe seems as if within his grasp the moment peace is
signed with Austria; he has long been intriguing with those countries,
sometimes with the Government, in other places with the people against
their Government; the arts, the dissimulations with which those