At the moment of their arrival Nelson had just quitted Palermo for Naples, taking with him the whole squadron.  The King of Naples had formally requested him to afford to the royal cause at the capital the assistance of the fleet, because the successes of the royalists elsewhere in the kingdom rendered imminent an insurrection in the city against the republican party and the French, which held the castles; and such insurrection, unless adequately supported, might either fail or lead to deplorable excesses.  Lady Hamilton, whose irregular interference in State concerns receives here singular illustration, strongly urged this measure in a letter, written to the admiral after an interview with the Queen.  Nelson consented, took on board seventeen hundred troops, with the Hereditary Prince, who was to represent the King,—­the latter not wishing to go,—­and was already clear of Palermo Bay when the two ships from Keith appeared.  Gathering from their information that the French were bound for Naples or Sicily, in which his own judgment coincided, he returned at once into port, landed the Prince and the troops, and then took the squadron again off Maritimo, where he expected Ball and the two ships off Malta to join him without delay.  “The French force being twenty-two sail of the line,” he wrote in suppressed reproach to Keith, “four of which are first rates, the force with me being only sixteen of the line, not one of which was of three decks, three being Portuguese, and one of the English being a sixty-four, very short of men, I had no choice left but to return to Palermo.”

With this incident of the insufficient reinforcement sent, began the friction with Keith which appears more openly in his correspondence with others.  To St. Vincent, still commander-in-chief, he wrote:  “I send a copy of my letter to Lord Keith, and I have only stated my regret that his Lordship could not have sent me a force fit to face the enemy:  but, as we are, I shall not get out of their way; although, as I am, I cannot think myself justified in exposing the world (I may almost say) to be plundered by these miscreants.  I trust your Lordship will not think me wrong in the painful determination I conceived myself forced to make,” that is, to go back to Palermo, “for agonized indeed was the mind of your Lordship’s faithful and affectionate servant.”

Nelson appears to have felt that the return to Palermo, though imperative, in view of the relative forces of himself and the French, would not only postpone and imperil the restoration of the royal family, but would bring discredit upon himself for not seeking and fighting the enemy’s fleet.  “I shall wait off Maritimo,” he wrote Keith, “anxiously expecting such a reinforcement as may enable me to go in search of the enemy’s fleet, when not one moment shall be lost in bringing them to battle; for,” he continues, with one of those flashes of genius which from time to time, unconsciously to himself, illuminate his writings, “I consider the best