Nelson was now nearly twenty-five.  In direct achievement he had accomplished little, and to most he was unknown; but he did not deceive himself in believing that his reputation was established, and his promise, as a capable man of action, understood by those who knew him, and especially by the brilliant admiral under whom he had last served.  Within a week of his release from the ship Hood carried him to Court, and presented him to the King,—­an evident proof of his approbation; and Nelson notes that the sovereign was exceedingly attentive.  The next few months were spent in London, or at his old home in Norfolk, to which and to his family he was always fondly attached.  Toward the end of October he obtained a leave of absence, in order to visit France and acquire the French language.  His impressions of that country, as far as he went,—­from Calais to St. Omer,—­are given in lively enough style in a few letters; but they differ little from what might be expected from any very young man deeply tinged with insular prejudice.  “I hate their country and their manners,” he wrote, soon after his return; and his biographers were quite right in saying that he had been brought up in the old anti-Gallican school, with prejudices not to be eradicated by a flying visit.  He duly records his disgust with two British naval captains, one of whom was afterwards among his most valued and valuable friends, for wearing epaulettes, at that time confined to the French service.  “I hold them a little cheap,” he said, “for putting on any part of a Frenchman’s uniform.”

It is more interesting to notice that his impressionable fancy was again taken by an attractive young Englishwoman, the daughter of a clergyman named Andrews, living at St. Omer.  “Two very beautiful young ladies,” he writes to Locker and to his brother; “I must take care of my heart, I assure you.”  “My heart is quite secured against the French beauties; I almost wish I could say as much for an English young lady, the daughter of a clergyman, with whom I am just going to dine, and spend the day.  She has such accomplishments that, had I a million of money, I am sure I should at this moment make her an offer of them.”  “The most accomplished woman my eyes ever beheld,” he repeats, a month later.  The sentimental raptures of a young man about a handsome girl have in themselves too much of the commonplace to justify mention.  What is remarkable, and suggests an explanation of the deplorable vagary of his later years, is that his attachment to his wife, even in the days of courtship, elicited no such extravagance of admiration as that into which he freely lapses in his earlier fancies, and yet more in his last absorbing passion.  Respect and tenderness for her he certainly felt and expressed; but there is no indication that she ever enkindled his ardent imagination, or filled for him the place of an ideal, which his mental constitution imperatively demanded as an object of worship.  The present attachment