Naples,—­the Jacobins, as they were called.  “Send me word some proper heads are taken off,” he wrote to Troubridge, “this alone will comfort me.”  “Our friend Troubridge had a present made him the other day, of the head of a Jacobin,” he tells St. Vincent, “and makes an apology to me, the weather being very hot, for not sending it here!” Upon the copy of the letter accompanying this ghastly gift to him, Troubridge had written, “A jolly fellow.  T. Troubridge.”  The exasperation to which political animosities had given rise may be gauged by the brutal levity shown in this incident, by men of the masculine and generous characters of Troubridge and Nelson, and should not be forgotten in estimating the actions that in due consequence followed.

The duties as well as the anxieties of his situation bore heavily upon Nelson, and may help to account, in combination with the tide of adverse fortune now running strongly, for the depression that weighed upon him.  “My public correspondence, besides the business of sixteen sail-of-the-line, and all our commerce, is with Petersburg, Constantinople, the Consul at Smyrna, Egypt, the Turkish and Russian admirals, Trieste, Vienna, Tuscany, Minorca, Earl St. Vincent, and Lord Spencer.  This over, what time can I have for any private correspondence?” Yet, admitting freely that there is a limit beyond which activity may cease to please, what has become of the joyous spirit, which wrote, not four years before:  “This I like, active service or none!” Occupying one of the most distinguished posts open to the Navy; practically, and almost formally, independent; at the very head and centre of the greatest interests,—­his zeal, while preserving all its intensity, has lost all its buoyancy.  “My dear Lord,” he tells St. Vincent, alluding at the moment to his stepson Nisbet, “there is no true happiness in this life, and in my present state I could quit it with a smile.”  “My spirits have received such a shock,” he writes some days after, to the wife of his early patron, Sir Peter Parker, “that I think they cannot recover it.  You who remember me always laughing and gay, would hardly believe the change; but who can see what I have and be well in health?  Kingdoms lost and a royal family in distress.”  “Believe me,” he confides to his intimate friend Davison a month later, “my only wish is to sink with honour into the grave, and when that shall please God, I shall meet death with a smile.  Not that I am insensible to the honours and riches my King and Country have heaped upon me, so much more than any officer could deserve; yet I am ready to quit this world of trouble, and envy none but those of the estate six feet by two.”  “I am at times ill at ease, but it is my duty to submit, and you may be sure I will not quit my post without absolute necessity.”  “What a state I am in!” he writes of one of those perplexities inevitable to an officer in his position.  “If I go, I risk Sicily; as I stay, my heart is breaking.”