as beyond dispute the coming chief of the British Navy; it was the long antecedent period of unswerving continuance in strenuous action, allowing no flagging of earnestness for a moment to appear, no chance for service, however small or distant, to pass unimproved.  It was the same unremitting pressing forward, which had brought him so vividly to the front in the abortive fleet actions of the previous year,—­an impulse born, partly, of native eagerness for fame, partly of zeal for the interests of his country and his profession.  “Mine is all honour; so much for the Navy!” as he wrote, somewhat incoherently, to his brother, alluding to a disappointment about prize money.

Nelson himself had an abundant, but not an exaggerated, consciousness of this increase of reputation; and he knew, too, that he was but reaping as he had diligently sowed.  “If credit and honour in the service are desirable,” he tells his brother, “I have my full share.  I have never lost an opportunity of distinguishing myself, not only as a gallant man, but as having a head; for, of the numerous plans I have laid, not one has failed.”  “You will be informed from my late letters,” he writes to his wife, “that Sir John Jervis has such an opinion of my conduct, that he is using every influence, both public and private, with Lord Spencer, for my continuance on this station; and I am certain you must feel the superior pleasure of knowing, that my integrity and plainness of conduct are the cause of my being kept from you, to the receiving me as a person whom no commander-in-chief would wish to keep under his flag.  Sir John was a perfect stranger to me, therefore I feel the more flattered; and when I reflect that I have had the unbounded confidence of three commanders-in-chief, I cannot but feel a conscious pride, and that I possess abilities.”  “If my character is known,” he writes to the Genoese Government, which knew it well, “it will be credited that this blockade [of Leghorn] will be attended to with a degree of rigour unexampled in the present war.”  “It has pleased God this war,” he tells the Duke of Clarence, “not only to give me frequent opportunities of showing myself an officer worthy of trust, but also to prosper all my undertakings in the highest degree.  I have had the extreme good fortune, not only to be noticed in my immediate line of duty, but also to obtain the repeated approbation of His Majesty’s Ministers at Turin, Genoa, and Naples, as well as of the Viceroy of Corsica, for my conduct in the various opinions I have been called upon to give; and my judgment being formed from common sense, I have never yet been mistaken.”