to the one woman, in whom he either found or imagined the qualities that appealed to the heroic side of his character.  How completely she mastered all the approaches to his heart, and retained her supremacy, once established, to the end, is evidenced by the whole tenor of his correspondence with her, by his mention of her in letters to others, by the recorded expressions he used in speaking to or about her.  Despite all that he certainly knew of her, and much more that it is unreasonable to doubt he must have known of her history, there is no mistaking the profound emotions she stirred in his spirit, which show themselves continually in spontaneous outbreaks of passionate fondness and extravagant admiration, whose ring is too true and strong for doubt concerning their reality to find a place.

Many men are swayed by strong and wayward impulses; but to most the fetters imposed by social conventions, by inherited or implanted standards of seemliness and decorum, suffice to steady them in the path of outward propriety.  Of how great and absorbing a passion Lord Nelson was capable is shown by the immensity of the sacrifice that he made to it.  Principle apart,—­and principle wholly failed him,—­all else that most appeals to man’s self-respect and regard for the esteem of others was powerless to exert control.  Loyalty to friendship, the sanctity which man is naturally fain to see in the woman he loves, and, in Nelson’s own case, a peculiar reluctance to wound another,—­all these were trampled under foot, and ruthlessly piled on the holocaust which he offered to her whom he worshipped.  He could fling to the winds, as others cannot, considerations of interest or expediency, as he flung them over and over in his professional career.  My motto, he said once and again, is “All or nothing.”  The same disregard of consequences that hazarded all for all, in battle or for duty, broke through the barriers within which prudence, reputation, decency, or even weakness and cowardice, confine the actions of lesser men.  And it must be remembered that the admitted great stain upon Nelson’s fame, which it would be wicked to deny, lies not in a general looseness of life, but in the notoriety of one relation,—­a notoriety due chiefly to the reckless singleness of heart which was not ashamed to own its love, but rather gloried in the public exhibition of a faith in the worthiness of its object, and a constancy, which never wavered to the hour of his death.[14] The pitifulness of it is to see the incongruity between such faith, such devotion, and the distasteful inadequacy of their object.

To answer the demands of a nature capable of such energetic manifestation—­to fulfil the imagination of one who could so cast himself at the feet of an ideal—­was beyond the gentle, well-ordered, and somewhat prosaic charms with which alone Mrs. Nisbet was invested by Nelson, even when most loverlike in tone.  “My greatest wish,” he writes in the first of his letters to her that has been preserved,