the extraordinary talent which is needed for the execution.”  “You never saw anything so charming as Lady Hamilton’s attitudes,” wrote Lady Malmesbury in 1791.  “The most graceful statues or pictures do not give you an idea of them.”  “It is a beautiful performance,” wrote Mrs. St. George, who saw her in 1800, when the Hamiltons and Nelson were travelling on the Continent, “amusing to the most ignorant, and highly interesting to the lovers of art.  It is remarkable that although coarse and ungraceful in common life, she becomes highly graceful, and even beautiful, during this performance.  It is also singular that, in spite of the accuracy of her imitation of the finest ancient draperies, her usual dress is tasteless, vulgar, loaded and unbecoming.”

The stormy period of the French Revolution, which was about to burst into universal war at the time she was married, gave Lady Hamilton another opportunity to come yet more conspicuously before men’s eyes than she had hitherto done.  It is not easy to say what degree of influence she really attained, or what particular results she may have effected; but she certainly managed to give herself so much the air of a person of importance, in the political intrigues of the day in Naples, as at the least to impose successfully upon a great many, and to be accepted very much at her own valuation.  The French ambassador, writing to Bonaparte in 1798, says:  “If the preponderance which the French Republic ought to take here, removed hence Acton and the wife of Hamilton, this country, without other changes, would be extremely useful for the execution of all your projects in the Mediterranean;” and Sir William himself, who should have known, speaks of her activity and utility,—­“for several years the real and only confidential friend of the Queen of Naples.”  Nelson, writing to the Queen of Naples in 1804, after Hamilton’s death, said:  “Your Majesty well knows that it was her capacity and conduct which sustained his diplomatic character during the last years in which he was at Naples."[73] Certainly, Nelson believed, with all the blindness of love, whatever his mistress chose to tell him, but he was not without close personal knowledge of the inside history of at least two of those last years; for, in 1801, addressing Mr. Addington, then Prime Minister, he used these words:  “Having for a length of time seen the correspondence both public and private, from all the Neapolitan ministers to their Government and to the Queen of Naples, I am perfectly acquainted with the views of the several Powers.”  For her success Lady Hamilton was indebted, partly to her personal advantages, and partly to her position as wife of the British minister and chosen friend to the Queen.  Great Britain played a leading part everywhere in the gigantic struggle throughout the Continent, but to a remote peninsular kingdom like Naples, protected by its distance from the centres of strife, yet not wholly inaccessible by land, the chief maritime state was the one and only sufficient ally.  A rude reminder of his exposure to naval attack had been given to the King of the Two Sicilies, in 1792, by the appearance of a French fleet, which extorted satisfaction for an alleged insult, by threatening instant bombardment of his capital.