impulses, she had not a shred of principle to take the place of the motive of self-interest, which hitherto had been so peremptory in its exactions.  What she was in delicacy in 1791, that she remained in 1796,—­five years after the disappearance of her social disabilities; a pretty fair proof that what she possessed of it was but skin deep, the result of a diligent observance of Greville’s proprieties, for her personal advantage, not the token of a noble inner spirit struggling from excusable defilement to the light.  “She does the honours of the house with great attention and desire to please,” wrote Greville’s correspondent of 1791, before quoted, “but wants a little refinement of manners, in which, in the course of six years, I wonder she has not made greater progress.”  “She is all Nature and yet all Art,” said Sir Gilbert Elliot, in 1796; “that is to say, her manners are perfectly unpolished, of course very easy, though not with the ease of good breeding, but of a barmaid; excessively good humoured, and wishing to please and be admired by all ages and sorts of persons that come in her way; but besides considerable natural understanding, she has acquired, since her marriage, some knowledge of history and of the arts, and one wonders at the application and pains she has taken to make herself what she is.  With men her language and conversation are exaggerations of anything I ever heard anywhere; and I was wonderfully struck with these inveterate remains of her origin, though the impression was very much weakened by seeing the other ladies of Naples.”  “I thought her a very handsome, vulgar woman,” curtly commented the lieutenant of a frigate which visited Naples in the summer of 1798, while hunting for Nelson in the game of cross-purposes that preceded the Nile.[70] Allowing for difference of observers, it is plain that the Lady Hamilton whom Nelson now met, had not improved in essentials over the Emma Hart of a half-dozen years before.

Two years afterwards, the verdict of these men was confirmed by Mrs. St. George,[71] a lady in London society, who viewed her possibly with something of the repugnant prejudice of a refined and cultivated woman, yet evidently measured her words calmly, even in her private journal.  “I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with the manners of her first situation much more strongly than one would suppose, after having represented Majesty, and lived in good company fifteen years.  Her dress is frightful.  Her waist is absolutely between her shoulders.”  Nelson measured her by a different standard.  “In every point of view,” he tells herself, “from Ambassatrice to the duties of domestic life, I never saw your equal.  That elegance of manners, accomplishments, and, above all, your goodness of heart, is unparalleled.”  The same lady describes her personal appearance, at the time when his devotion had reached the height from which it never declined.  “Her figure is colossal, but, excepting her feet, which are hideous,