love-messages to the seductive Emma.  His dreary life, without any exciting incident except the carrying away of sails or spars, and the irritation of not being able to get what he regarded as life or death requests carried into effect owing to the slothfulness or incompetent indifference of the Admiralty was continual agony to him.  He writes in one of his dispatches to the Admiralty:  “Were I to die this moment, want of frigates would be found stamped on my heart.  No words of mine,” he continues, “can express what I have suffered and am suffering for want of them.”

No person could write such an unconsciously comic lament to a department supposed to be administered with proficiency unless he were borne down by a deep sense of its appalling incompetency.  It is quite likely that the recipients of the burning phrases regarded them in the light of a joke, but they were very real to the wearied soul of the man who wrote them.  I do not find any instances of conscious humour in any of Nelson’s letters or utterances.  It is really their lack of humour that is humorous.  He always appears to be in sombre earnest about affairs that matter, and whimsically affected by those that don’t.  The following lines, which are not my own, may be regarded as something akin to Nelson’s conception of himself.  If he had come across them, I think he would have said to himself, “Ah! yes, these verses describe my mission and me.”

    “Like a warrior angel sped
       On a mighty mission,
    Light and life about him shed—­
       A transcendent vision.

    “Mailed in gold and fire he stands,
       And, with splendours shaken,
    Bids the slumbering seas and lands
       Quicken and awaken.”

Nelson never attempted to carry out a mere reckless and palpably useless feat for the purpose of show.  His well-balanced genius of caution and accurate judgment was the guiding instinct in his terrific thrusts which mauled the enemy out of action at the Nile, St. Vincent, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and enthralled the world with new conceptions of naval warfare.  He met with bitter disappointments in his search for the illusive French fleet, which wore him, as he says, to a skeleton, but never once was he shaken in his vigorous belief that he would catch and annihilate them in the end.  They cleverly crept out of Toulon, with the intention, it is said, of going to Egypt.  Villeneuve was no fool at evasive tactics.  His plan was practically unerring, and threw Nelson completely off the scent and kept him scouring the seas in search of the bird that had flown weeks before.  Once the scent is lost, it takes a long time to pick it up.  Villeneuve no doubt argued that it was not his purpose to give the British Admiral an opportunity of fighting just then.  He had other fish to fry, and if he wished to get away clear from Toulon and evade Nelson’s ships, he must first of all delude him by sending a few ships out to mislead the enemy’s