to Nelson’s proud confidence in his admiral and his service, he acted with such precipitation as to leave Gibraltar without filling with provisions, and arrived so destitute that Jervis had to send him back at once, with orders to replenish with stores and then to rejoin without delay.  Under the influence of the panic which prevailed at Gibraltar, Man had also sent such advices to the coast of Portugal as caused the commander-in-chief to fear that expected supplies might be arrested.  “Oh, our convoy!” cried Nelson; “Admiral Man, how could you quit Gibraltar?” Yet, as he wrote to Jervis, he had expected some such step, from what he had already seen “under his hand to you.”

Thus, for the time at least, there were lost to the British seven of the ships-of-the-line upon which Nelson had reckoned in his letter to the Duke of Clarence.  It was possibly on this account that Jervis wrote him to shift his commodore’s pendant to a frigate, and send the “Captain” to the fleet.  Nelson obeyed, of course, and at once; but taking advantage of the fact that no captain had yet joined his ship, he thought it “advisable to go in her myself.”  In this he doubtless was influenced chiefly by his unwillingness to miss a battle, especially against such great numerical odds.  “I take for granted,” he admitted to the Viceroy, “that the admiral will send me back in a cutter, but I shall give him a good ordered seventy-four, and take my chance of helping to thrash Don Langara, than which few things, I assure you, would give me more real pleasure.”  The particular emergency seems, however, soon to have passed; for after two days with the fleet he returned off Leghorn in the “Captain,” somewhat comforted as to the apprehensions of the British Cabinet.  “Whatever fears we may have for Corsica, it is certain Government at home have none, by taking so very respectable a part of your force away.”  A regiment had been transferred to Gibraltar with Man’s squadron, when the latter returned there.

These rising hopes and stirring expectations of brilliant service were speedily dashed.  On the 25th of September Jervis received orders from the Admiralty to abandon Corsica, to retreat from the Mediterranean, and to proceed with the fleet to England.  In pursuance of these instructions Nelson was directed to superintend the evacuation of Bastia, the “most secret” letter to that effect reaching him at that port on the 29th of September,—­his birthday.  The purpose of the ministry filled him with shame and indignation.  Confronted abruptly with the course which four months before had seemed to him natural and proper, the shock brought out the fulness of the change through which he had passed meantime.  He has no illusions about Corsica.  The inhabitants had disappointed all the expectations of the British,—­“At a peace I should rejoice at having given up the island.”  But the days passing over his head had brought wider and maturer views of the general policy of Great Britain,