As the close attention of the skilled surgeons in whose hands he had been was now no longer needed, he returned to Bath to await the time when his flagship should be completely equipped.  St. Vincent had asked that the “Foudroyant,” of eighty guns, should be prepared for him; but, after his sudden recovery, as she was not yet ready, there was substituted for her the “Vanguard,” seventy-four, which was commissioned by Berry at Chatham on the 19th of December.  In March she had reached Portsmouth, and Nelson then went up to London, where he attended a levee on the 14th of the month and took leave of the King.  On the 29th his flag was hoisted, and on the 10th of April, after a week’s detention at St. Helen’s by head winds, he sailed for Lisbon.  There he remained for four days, and on the 30th of the month, off Cadiz, rejoined St. Vincent, by whom he was received with open arms.  The veteran seaman, stern and resolved as was his bearing in the face of danger, was unhopeful about the results of the war, which from the first he had not favored, and for whose ending he was eager.  Now, at sixty-four, his health was failing, and the difficulties and dangers of the British cause in the Mediterranean weighed upon him, with a discouragement very alien from the sanguine joy with which his ardent junior looked forward to coming battles.  His request to be relieved from command, on the score of ill health, was already on file at the Admiralty.  “I do assure your Lordship,” he wrote to Earl Spencer, “that the arrival of Admiral Nelson has given me new life; you could not have gratified me more than in sending him; his presence in the Mediterranean is so very essential, that I mean to put the “Orion” and “Alexander” under his command, with the addition of three or four frigates, and send him away, to endeavour to ascertain the real object of the preparations making by the French.”  These preparations for a maritime expedition were being made at Toulon and the neighboring ports, on a scale which justly aroused the anxiety of the British Cabinet, as no certain information about their object had been obtained.

Nelson’s departure from England on this occasion closes the first of the two periods into which his career naturally divides.  From his youth until now, wherever situated, the development has been consecutive and homogeneous, external influences and internal characteristics have worked harmoniously together, nature and ambition have responded gladly to opportunity, and the course upon which they have combined to urge him has conformed to his inherited and acquired standards of right and wrong.  Doubt, uncertainty, inward friction, double motives, have been unknown to him; he has moved freely in accordance with the laws of his being, and, despite the anxieties of his profession and the frailty of his health, there is no mistaking the tone of happiness and contentment which sounds without a jarring note throughout his correspondence.  A change was now at hand.  As the sails of the