During the remainder of the month he continued to be amused with those unfounded reports of victories, which are among the invariable concomitants of all wars, and which his sanguine temperament and peculiar readiness to trust others made him especially ready to accept.  He was not wholly unaware of this tendency in himself, though he continued to repeat with apparent belief reports of the most startling and erroneous character, and never seems to have appreciated, up to the time of his leaving the Mediterranean, the astonishing quickness and sagacity with which Bonaparte frustrated the overwhelming combinations against him.  “We hear what we wish,” he says on one occasion.  “The Toulon information is, as I always thought it, pleasant to know but never to be depended upon; all is guess.  I have long had reason to suspect great part is fabricated in Genoa;” but he was continually deceived by it.

Throughout the discomfitures of the Austrians on shore, the purely naval part of the war continued to be successfully maintained.  Jervis, with unrelaxing grip, kept his position before Toulon, effectually checking every attempt of the French fleet to escape unobserved into the open, while Nelson shut up Leghorn so rigorously that the enemy lost even the partial advantage, as a port of supply, which they had before drawn from its neutrality.  But, during this pregnant summer, grave causes for anxiety were rolling up in the western basin of the Mediterranean.  The attitude of Spain had long been doubtful, so much so that before Sir John Jervis left England, in the previous autumn, the ministry had deliberated upon the contingency of her declaring war, and a conditional decision had been reached to evacuate Corsica, if that event occurred.  During the spring of 1796 reports of coming hostilities were current in the fleet.  Nelson’s first opinion was that, if they ensued, there was no object in remaining in the Mediterranean, except to preserve Corsica from the French.  This, he thought, was not a sufficient motive, nor had the conduct of the natives entitled them to protection.  With all the powers making peace with France, he hoped Great Britain would leave the Mediterranean.  This, however, was but a passing expression of discouragement, whence he soon rallied, and, with a spirit worthy of his race, which was soon to face all Europe undismayed, his courage mounted continually as the storm drew nearer.

The summer of 1796 was in truth the period of transition, when the victories of Bonaparte, by bringing near a cessation of warfare upon the land, were sweeping from the scene the accessories that confused the view of the future, removing conditions and details which perplexed men’s attention, and bringing into clear relief the one field upon which the contest was finally to be fought out, and the one foe, the British sea-power, upon whose strength and constancy would hinge the issues of the struggle.  The British Navy, in the slight person of its indomitable champion,