&c.”  Nelson was saved from fatal hesitation, primarily, by his singleness of purpose, which looked first to his country’s service, to the thorough doing of the work given him to do, and only afterwards to the consequences of failure to his own fame and fortunes.  At that moment the choice before him was either to follow out an indication, slight, but as far as it went clear, which, though confessedly precarious, promised to lead to a great and decisive result, such as he had lately urged upon the King of Naples; or to remain where he was, in an inglorious security, perfectly content, to use words of his own, that “each day passed without loss to our side.”  To the latter conclusion might very well have contributed the knowledge, that the interests which the Cabinet thought threatened were certainly for the present safe.  Broadly as his instructions were drawn, no word of Egypt or the East was specifically in them.  Naples, Sicily, Portugal, or Ireland, such were the dangers intimated by Spencer and St. Vincent in their letters, and he was distinctly cautioned against letting the enemy get to the westward of him.  He might have consoled himself for indecisive action, which procrastinated disaster and covered failure with the veil of nullity, as did a former commander of his in a gazetted letter, by the reflection that, so far as the anticipations of the ministry went, the designs of the enemy were for the time frustrated, by the presence of his squadron between them and the points indicated to him.

But the single eye of principle gained keener insight in this case by the practised habit of reflection, which came prepared, to the full extent of an acute intellect, to detect every glimmer of light, and to follow them to the point where they converged upon the true solution; and both principle and reflection were powerfully supported in their final action by a native temperament, impatient of hesitations, of half measures, certain that the annihilation of the French fleet, and nothing short of its annihilation, fulfilled that security of his country’s interests in which consisted the spirit of his instructions.  His own words in self-defence, when for a moment it seemed as if, after all, he had blundered in the great risk he took, though rough in form, rise to the eloquence that speaks out of the abundance of the heart.  “The only objection I can fancy to be started is,’you should not have gone such a long voyage without more certain information of the enemy’s destination:’  my answer is ready—­who was I to get it from?  The governments of Naples and Sicily either knew not, or chose to keep me in ignorance.  Was I to wait patiently till I heard certain accounts?  If Egypt was their object, before I could hear of them they would have been in India.  To do nothing, I felt, was disgraceful; therefore I made use of my understanding, and by it I ought to stand or fall.”