guard he proceeded to invent a cock-and-bull story of how he came by the child.  Here is his letter to Lady Hamilton written in the middle of 1804:  “I am now going to state a thing to you and to request your kind assistance which, from my dear Emma’s goodness of heart, I am sure of her acquiescence in.  Before we left Italy, I told you of the extraordinary circumstances of a child being left to my care and protection.  On your first coming to England, I presented you the child, dear Horatia.  You became, to my comfort, attached to it, so did Sir William, thinking her the finest child he had ever seen.  She is become of that age when it is necessary to remove her from a mere nurse, and to think of educating her.  I am now anxious for the child’s being placed under your protecting wing”; a clumsy, transparent piece of foolery, which at once confirms its intention to mislead!  But we are saved the trouble of interpretation, for the father goes on to write on another piece of note-paper, “My beloved, how I feel for your situation and that of our dear Horatia, our dear child.”  It is almost incredible that Nelson could have written such a silly fabrication.  In the early part of 1804, Emma gave birth to another child, of which he believed himself to be the father.  He asked the mother to call him what she pleased (evidently he hoped and expected a boy), but if a girl, it was to be named Emma.  It was a girl, so it was called after the mother, but it did not live long, and the father never saw it.

As though he thought the letter written about little Miss Thompson (Horatia, be it understood) were not sufficiently delusive, he sends an equally absurd production to his niece, Charlotte Nelson, who lived a good deal at Merton, in which he says that he is “truly sensible of her attachment to that dear little orphan, Horatia,” and although her parents are lost, yet she is not “without a fortune; and that he will cherish her to the last moment of his life, and curse them who curse her, and Heaven bless them who bless her.”  This solemn enthusiasm for the poor orphan puts Nelson out of court as a cute letter-writer.  The quality of ingenious diplomacy had been left entirely out of him, and like any one else who dallies with an art for which they have no gift, he excites suspicions, and more often than not discloses the very secret he is so anxious to keep.  Every line of these letters indicates a tussle between a natural tendency to frank honesty and an unnatural and unworthy method of deception.  Obviously, the recipient of this precious document would have her curiosity excited over the disingenuous tale of romance.  She would ask herself first of all, “Why should my kinsman be so desirous to tell me that the orphan in whom he has so fond an interest is not without a fortune? and why should the responsibility of rearing and educating the child have been entrusted to him, the most active and important Admiral in the British Navy?  And