With so vivid a career as that of Nelson ahead, the delay imposed by this wrangling episode is somewhat dreary; but it undeniably shows his characteristics in the strongest light.  Duty, not ease; honor, not gain; the ideal, not the material,—­such, not indeed without frailty and blemish, were ever his motives.  And, while he craved his reward in the approval and recognition of those around and above him, he could find consolation for the lack of them in his own sense of right-doing.  “That thing called Honour,” he writes to a friend soon after the “Boreas” cruise, “is now, alas! thought of no more.  My integrity cannot be mended, I hope; but my fortune, God knows, has grown worse for the service; so much for serving my country.  But I have invariably laid down, and followed close, a plan of what ought to be uppermost in the breast of an officer:  that it is much better to serve an ungrateful Country than to give up his own fame.  Posterity will do him justice; a uniform conduct of honour and integrity seldom fails of bringing a man to the goal of fame at last.”

This struggle with Sir Richard Hughes, in which Nelson took the undesirable, and to a naval officer invidious, step of disobeying orders, showed clearly, not only the loftiness of his motives, but the distinguishing features which constituted the strength of his character, both personal and military.  There was an acute perception of the right thing to do, an entire readiness to assume all the responsibility of doing it, and above all an accurate judgment of the best way to do it,—­to act with impunity to himself and with most chances of success to his cause.  Its analogy to a military situation is striking.  There was a wrong condition of things to be righted—­a victory to be won.  To achieve this a great risk must be taken, and he was willing to take it; but in so doing he made such choice of his ground as to be practically unassailable—­to attain his end without lasting harm to himself.  That Nelson would have managed better had he been ten years older is very probable.  Likely enough he betrayed some of the carelessness of sensibilities which the inexperience of youth is too apt to show towards age; but, upon a careful review of the whole, it appears to the writer that his general course of action was distinctly right, judged by the standards of the time and the well-settled principles of military obedience, and that he pursued an extremely difficult line of conduct with singular resolution, with sound judgment, and, in the main, with an unusual amount of tact, without which he could scarcely have failed, however well purposing, to lay himself open to serious consequences.  Certainly he achieved success.