“Vanguard” dip below the horizon of England, a brief interlude begins, and when the curtain rises again, the scene is shifted,—­surroundings have changed.  We see again the same man, but standing at the opening of a new career, whose greatness exceeds by far even the high anticipations that had been formed for him.  Before leaving England he is a man of distinction only; prominent, possibly, among the many distinguished men of his own profession, but the steady upward course has as yet been gradual, the shining of the light, if it has latterly shot forth flashes suggestive of hidden fires, is still characterized by sustained growth in intensity rather than by rapid increase.  No present sign so far foretells the sudden ascent to fame, the burst of meridian splendor with which the sun of his renown was soon to rise upon men’s eyes, and in which it ran its course to the cloudless finish of his day.

Not that there is in that course—­in its achievements—­any disproportion with the previous promise.  The magnitude of the development we are about to witness is due, not to a change in him, but to the increased greatness of the opportunities.  A man of like record in the past, but less gifted, might, it is true, have failed to fill the new sphere which the future was to present.  Nelson proved fully equal to it, because he possessed genius for war, intellectual faculties, which, though not unsuspected, had not hitherto been allowed scope for their full exercise.  Before him was now about to open a field of possibilities hitherto unexampled in naval warfare; and for the appreciation of them was needed just those perceptions, intuitive in origin, yet resting firmly on well-ordered rational processes, which, on the intellectual side, distinguished him above all other British seamen.  He had already, in casual comment upon the military conditions surrounding the former Mediterranean campaigns, given indications of these perceptions, which it has been the aim of previous chapters to elicit from his correspondence, and to marshal in such order as may illustrate his mental characteristics.  But, for success in war, the indispensable complement of intellectual grasp and insight is a moral power, which enables a man to trust the inner light,—­to have faith,—­a power which dominates hesitation, and sustains action, in the most tremendous emergencies, and which, from the formidable character of the difficulties it is called to confront, is in no men so conspicuously prominent as in those who are entitled to rank among great captains.  The two elements—­mental and moral power—­are often found separately, rarely in due combination.  In Nelson they met, and their coincidence with the exceptional opportunities afforded him constituted his good fortune and his greatness.