These words show the nervous exasperation superinduced by the tremendous strain of official anxiety and mortified ambition; for the governor’s objections were purely formal and perfunctory, as was the Court’s submission to the French.  “Our present wants,” he admitted at the same writing, “have been most amply supplied, and every attention has been paid us.”  Years afterwards Nelson spoke feelingly of the bitter mental anguish of that protracted and oft-thwarted pursuit.  “Do not fret at anything,” he told his friend Troubridge; “I wish I never had, but my return to Syracuse in 1798, broke my heart, which on any extraordinary anxiety now shows itself, be that feeling pain or pleasure.”  “On the 18th I had near died, with the swelling of some of the vessels of the heart.  More people, perhaps, die of broken hearts than we are aware of.”  But the firmness of his purpose, the clearness of his convictions, remained unslackened and unclouded.  “What a situation am I placed in!” he writes, when he finds Hamilton’s despatches returned.  “As yet I can learn nothing of the enemy.  You will, I am sure, and so will our country, easily conceive what has passed in my anxious mind; but I have this comfort, that I have no fault to accuse myself of.  This bears me up, and this only.”  “Every moment I have to regret the frigates having left me,” he tells St. Vincent.  “Your lordship deprived yourself of frigates to make mine certainly the first squadron in the world, and I feel that I have zeal and activity to do credit to your appointment, and yet to be unsuccessful hurts me most sensibly.  But if they are above water, I will find them out, and if possible bring them to battle.  You have done your part in giving me so fine a fleet, and I hope to do mine in making use of them.”

In five days the squadron had filled with water and again sailed.  Satisfied that the enemy were somewhere in the Levant, Nelson now intended a deliberate search for them—­or rather for their fleet, the destruction of which was the crucial object of all his movements.  “It has been said,” he wrote to Hamilton, “that to leeward of the two frigates I saw off Cape Passaro was a line-of-battle ship, with the riches of Malta on board, but it was the destruction of the enemy, not riches for myself, that I was seeking.  These would have fallen to me if I had had frigates, but except the ship-of-the-line, I regard not all the riches in this world.”  A plaintive remonstrance against his second departure was penned by the Neapolitan prime minister, which depicts so plainly the commonplace view of a military situation,—­the apprehensions of one to whom immediate security is the great object in war,—­that it justifies quotation, and comparison with the clear intuitions, and firmly grasped principle, which placed Nelson always, in desire, alongside the enemy’s fleet, and twice carried him, at every risk, to the end of the Mediterranean to seek it.  “We are now in danger of a war, directly on Admiral Nelson’s