Under ordinary conditions Nelson might have seen this, but he was well handled.  Within three days he had been persuaded that upon his personal presence depended the salvation of Italy.  “My head is quite healed, and, if it were necessary, I could not at present leave Italy, who looks up to me as, under God, its Protector.”  He continually, by devout recollection of his indebtedness to God, seeks to keep himself in hand.  “I am placed by Providence in that situation, that all my caution will be necessary to prevent vanity from showing itself superior to my gratitude and thankfulness,”—­but the current was too strong for him, and was swollen to a torrent by the streams of adulation, which from all quarters flowed in upon a temperament only too disposed to accept them.  “Could I, my dearest Fanny,” he writes to Lady Nelson, “tell you half the honours which are shown me here, not a ream of paper would hold it.”  A grand ball was given on his birthday, September 29; and a rostral column was “erected under a magnificent canopy, never, Lady Hamilton says, to come down while they remain at Naples.”  Within a week the conviction of his own importance led him to write to Lady Hamilton, evidently for transmission to the Queen, an opinion, or rather an urgent expression of advice, that Naples should at once begin war.  It is only conjectural to say that this opinion, which rested on no adequate knowledge of the strength of the Neapolitan Kingdom, was elicited by the Queen through Lady Hamilton; but the inference derives support from the words, “I have read with admiration the queen’s dignified and incomparable letter of September, 1796,”—­two years before.  That his views were not the simple outcome of his own unbiassed study of the situation is evident enough.  “This country, by its system of procrastination, will ruin itself,” he writes to St. Vincent, the very day after drawing up the letter in question; “the queen sees it and thinks”—­not as I do, but—­“as we do.”  That Lady Hamilton was one of the “we” is plain, for in the postscript to the letter he says:  “Your Ladyship will, I beg, receive this letter as a preparative for Sir William Hamilton, to whom I am writing, with all respect, the firm and unalterable opinion of a British admiral,” etc.  Certainly these words—­taken with those already quoted, and written just a week afterwards, “Lady Hamilton has been my ambassadress to the queen”—­indicate that she was the intermediary between Nelson and the Court, as well as between him and her husband.

There is no record of any official request for this unofficial and irregular communication of the opinion of a British admiral; and, of course, when a man has allowed himself, unasked, though not unprompted, to press such a line of action, he has bound himself personally, and embarrassed himself officially, in case it turns out badly.  Nelson very soon, within a fortnight, had to realize this, in the urgent entreaties of the Court not to forsake them; and to see reason