GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY
But the grandest chapter of our experience within the whole mail-coach
service was on those occasions when we went down from London with the
news of victory. A period of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar
to Waterloo; the second and third years of which period (1806 and 1807)
were comparatively sterile; but the other nine (from 1805 to 1815
inclusively) furnished a long succession of victories, the least of
which, in such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of
position: partly for its absolute interference with the plans of our
enemy, but still more from its keeping alive through central Europe the
sense of a deep-seated vulnerability in France. Even to tease the
coasts of our enemy, to mortify them by continual blockades, to insult
them by capturing if it were but a baubling schooner under the eyes of
their arrogant armies, repeated from time to time a sullen proclamation
of power lodged in one quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned
in secret. How much more loudly must this proclamation have spoken in
the audacity [Footnote: "_Audacity_":--Such the French accounted
it; and it has struck me that Soult would not have been so popular in
London, at the period of her present Majesty's coronation, or in
Manchester, on occasion of his visit to that town, if they had been
aware of the insolence with which he spoke of us in notes written at
intervals from the field of Waterloo.
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