Despite his indomitable pluck and resolve, the confinement, uncertainty, and contention told heavily on Nelson’s health and spirits.  His temper was too kindly and social not to feel the general alienation.  It could not affect his purpose; but the sense of right-doing, which sustained him in that, did not make his road otherwise easier.  It is, indeed, especially to be noticed that there was not in him that hard, unyielding fibre, upon which care, or neglect, or anxiety, makes little impression.  He was, on the contrary, extremely sympathetic, even emotional; and although insensible to bodily fear, he was by no means so to censure, or to risk of other misfortune.  To this susceptibility to worry, strong witness is borne by an expression of his, used at the very time of which we are now writing.  One of his friends—­Captain Pole of the Navy—­had detained and sent in a neutral vessel for breach of belligerent rights.  After long legal proceedings, extending over five years, she was condemned, and proved to be a very valuable prize to the captors.  “Our friend Charles Pole,” he writes, “has been fortunate in his trial; but the lottery is so very much against an officer, that never will I knowingly involve myself in a doubtful cause.  Prize-money is doubtless very acceptable; but my mind would have suffered so much, that no pecuniary compensation, at so late a period, would have made me amends.”  Contrasting this utterance with the resolution shown by him at this time, in fighting what he considered the cause of his country in the West Indies, it can be seen how much stronger with him was the influence of duty than that exercised by any considerations of merely material advantage.  In the one he could find support; in the other not.  But in neither case was he insensible to care, nor could he escape the physical consequences of anxiety upon a delicate frame and nervous organization.  Of this, his harassment in the pursuit of the French fleet in 1798, during Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition, gave a very conspicuous illustration.

With such a temperament, being now very much in the position of an individual fighting a corporation, he appealed to the home Government; addressing, on the 29th of June, 1785, a memorial to the King, setting forth the facts of the case, as already given, adding that his health was much impaired, and asking for assistance.  He received a reply to this in the following September, informing him that the King had directed that he should be defended by the Crown lawyers.  This implied approval of his course was succeeded, in November, by a letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, through the usual official channels of the Admiralty, acquainting him that the Government was “of opinion that the commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands, and officers under him, have shown a very commendable zeal, in endeavouring to put a stop to the very illicit practices which were carrying on in the islands, in open violation of the law, and