Unhappily, Nelson was not able to stand the heady dose of flattery administered by a woman of such conspicuous beauty and consummate art; nor was his taste discriminating enough to experience any wholesome revolt against the rankness of the draught she offered him.  The quick appreciation of the born actress, which enabled her when on the stage to clothe herself with a grace and refinement that dropped away when she left it, conspired with his simplicity of confidence in others, and his strong tendency to idealize, to invest her with a character very different from the true.  Not that the Lady Hamilton of reality was utterly different from the Lady Hamilton of his imagination.  That she ever loved him is doubtful; but there were in her spirit impulses capable of sympathetic response to his own in his bravest acts, though not in his noblest motives.  It is inconceivable that duty ever appealed, to her as it did to him, nor could a woman of innate nobility of character have dragged a man of Nelson’s masculine renown about England and the Continent, till he was the mock of all beholders; but on the other hand it never could have occurred to the energetic, courageous, brilliant Lady Hamilton, after the lofty deeds and stirring dramatic scenes of St. Vincent, to beg him, as Lady Nelson did, “to leave boarding to captains.”  Sympathy, not good taste, would have withheld her.  In Lady Nelson’s letters there is evidence enough of a somewhat colorless womanly affection, but not a thrill of response to the greatness of her husband’s daring, even when surrounded herself by the acclamations it called forth.

What Nelson had never yet found in woman Lady Hamilton gave him,—­admiration and appreciation, undisguised and unmeasured, yet bestowed by one who had the power, by the admission of even unfriendly critics, of giving a reality and grace to the part she was performing.  He was soon at her feet.  The playful gallantry with which Ball, Elliot, and even old St. Vincent[74] himself, paid court to a handsome woman, greedy of homage, became in Nelson a serious matter.  Romantic in temperament, he was all day in flattering contact with her.  Worn out and ill from that “fever of anxiety,” to use his own words, which he had endured since the middle of June, she attended and nursed him.  “Lady Hamilton,” he exclaimed to Lady Nelson, with enthusiasm undiscriminating in more ways than one, “is one of the very best women in this world; she is an honour to her sex.”  A week later he tells her, with an odd collocation of persons:  “My pride is being your husband, the son of my dear father, and in having Sir William and Lady Hamilton for my friends.  While these approve my conduct, I shall not feel or regard the envy of thousands.”  The matter was passing rapidly into the platonic stage, in which Sir William was also erelong assigned an appropriate, if not wholly flattering, position.  “What can I say of hers and Sir William’s attention to me?  They are in fact, with the exception