MY DEAR LORD,—­We have a report that you are going home.  This distresses us most exceedingly, and myself in particular; so much so, that I have serious thoughts of returning, if that event should take place.  But for the sake of our Country, do not quit us at this serious moment.  I wish not to detract from the merit of whoever may be your successor; but it must take a length of time, which I hope the war will not give, to be in any manner a St. Vincent.  We look up to you, as we have always found you, as to our Father, under whose fostering care we have been led to fame....  Give not up a particle of your authority to any one; be again our St. Vincent, and we shall be happy.

    Your affectionate NELSON.

This letter did not reach St. Vincent before he carried his purpose into effect; but Nelson never quite forgave the abandonment of the command at such a moment.  In after years he spoke bitterly of it, as a thing he himself could not have done; failing, perhaps, to realize the difference in staying power between forty-five and sixty-five.

On the 2d of June, being then seventy miles southwest of Toulon, St. Vincent turned over to Keith the command of the twenty ships-of-the-line then with him, and went to Port Mahon.  For the moment he retained in his own hands the charge of the station,—­continued Commander-in-chief,—­with headquarters at Minorca, and two divisions cruising:  one of twenty ships, with Keith, between Toulon and Minorca, and one of sixteen, including three Portuguese, under Nelson in the waters of Sicily.  Friction between these two began at once.  Lord Keith was an accomplished and gallant officer, methodical, attentive, and correct; but otherwise he rose little above the commonplace, and, while he could not ignore Nelson’s great achievements, he does not seem to have had the insight which could appreciate the rare merit underlying them, nor the sympathetic temperament which could allow for his foibles.  Nelson, exasperated at the mere fact of the other’s succession to the command, speedily conceived for him an antipathy which Keith would have been more than mortal not to return; but it is to the honor of the latter’s self-command that, while insisting upon obedience from his brilliant junior, he bore his refractoriness with dignified patience.

After St. Vincent left him, Keith continued to stand to the northward and eastward.  On the 5th of June he received certain information that the French fleet, now twenty-two ships-of-the-line, was in Vado Bay.  This word he at once sent on to Nelson.  Next day his division was so close in with the Riviera, off Antibes, that it was fired upon by the shore batteries; but the wind coming to the eastward, when off Monaco, did not permit it to pass east of Corsica, and, fearing that the French would take that route and fall upon Nelson, Keith detached to him two seventy-fours, which joined him on the 13th of June.