exceeding even his own great aspirations coincides with dereliction from the plain rules of honor between friends, and with public humiliation to his wife, which he allowed himself to inflict, notwithstanding that he admitted her claims to his deferential consideration to be unbroken.  In this contrast, of the exaltation of the hero and the patriot with the degradation of the man, lie the tragedy and the misery of Nelson’s story.  And this, too, was incurred on behalf of a woman whose reputation and conduct were such that no shred of dignity could attach to an infatuation as doting as it was blamable.  The pitiful inadequacy of the temptation to the ruin it caused invests with a kind of prophecy the words he had written to his betrothed in the heyday of courtship:  “These I trust will ever be my sentiments; if they are not, I do verily believe it will be my folly that occasions it.”

The inward struggle, though severe, was short and decisive.  Once determined on his course, he choked down scruples and hesitations, and cast them from him with the same single-minded resolution that distinguished his public acts.  “Fixed as fate,” were the remorseless words with which he characterized his firm purpose to trample conscience under foot, and to reject his wife in favor of his mistress.  But although ease may be obtained by silencing self-reproach, safety scarcely can.  One cannot get the salt out of his life, and not be the worse for it.  Much that made Nelson so lovable remained to the end; but into his heart, as betrayed by his correspondence, and into his life, from the occasional glimpses afforded by letters or journals of associates, there thenceforth entered much that is unlovely, and which to no appreciable extent was seen before.  The simple bonhomie, the absence of conventional reticence, the superficial lack of polish, noted by his early biographers, and which he had had no opportunity to acquire, the childlike vanity that transpires so innocently in his confidential home letters, and was only the weak side of his noble longing for heroic action, degenerated rapidly into loss of dignity of life, into an unseemly susceptibility to extravagant adulation, as he succumbed to surroundings, the corruptness of which none at first realized more clearly, and where one woman was the sole detaining fascination.  And withal, as the poison worked, discontent with self bred discontent with others, and with his own conditions.  Petulance and querulousness too often supplanted the mental elasticity, which had counted for naught the roughnesses on the road to fame.  The mind not worthily occupied, and therefore ill at ease, became embittered, prone to censure and to resent, suspicious at times and harsh in judgment, gradually tending towards alienation, not from his wife only, but from his best and earliest friends.