falling light, the sail-power of the “Alexander” was scarcely sufficient to drag both ships against a heavy westerly swell which was setting them bodily upon the Sardinian coast, then not far distant.  Thinking the case hopeless, Nelson ordered the “Alexander” to let go the hawser; but Captain Ball begged permission to hold on, and finally succeeded in saving the flagship, which, on the 23d, anchored with her consorts under the Islands of San Pietro, at the southern extremity of Sardinia.  The governor of the place sent word that they must not remain, Sardinia being allied to France, but added that, as he had no power to force them out, they would doubtless do as they pleased; and he supplied them with fresh provisions,—­a line of conduct which illustrates at once the restrictions imposed upon British operations in the Mediterranean by French insistence, and at the same time the readiness of the weaker states to connive at the evasion of them, other instances of which occurred during this period.  By the united efforts of the division, four days sufficed to refit the “Vanguard” with jury-masts, and the three ships again sailed, on the 27th, for an appointed rendezvous, to seek the frigates, which had separated during and after the gale.

This severe check, occurring at so critical a moment,—­more critical even than Nelson knew, for he remained ignorant of the French sailing for some days longer,—­was in itself disheartening, and fell upon one whose native eagerness chafed painfully against enforced inaction and delay.  His manner of bearing it illustrated both the religious characteristics, which the experience of grave emergencies tends to develop and strengthen in men of action, and the firmness of a really great man, never more signally displayed than under the pressure of calamity and suspense, such as he continually had to undergo.  The exceptional brilliancy and decisiveness of his greater battles—­the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar—­obscure the fact that each of them was preceded by a weary period of strenuous uphill work, a steady hewing of his way through a tanglewood of obstacles, a patient endurance of disappointments, a display of sustained, undaunted resolution under discouragements, nobler far than even the moments of triumphant action, into which at last he joyfully emerges and freely exerts his extraordinary powers.  “I trust,” he wrote to St. Vincent, “my friends will think I bore my chastisement like a man.  I hope it has made me a better officer, as I believe it has made me a better man.  On the Sunday evening I thought myself in every respect one of the most fortunate men, to command such a squadron in such a place, and my pride was too great for man.”  To his wife he wrote in the same strain:  “I ought not to call what has happened to the Vanguard by the cold name of accident; I believe firmly that it was the Almighty’s goodness, to check my consummate vanity.”