a proper course; which ended in the detection and punishment of some of the parties whose conduct was complained of.”  The broad result appears to have been that the guilty for the most part escaped punishment, unless, indeed, some of them lost their positions, of which no certain information exists; but the corrupt combination was broken up, and measures were adopted to prevent the recurrence of the same iniquities.  Upon Nelson himself the effect was twofold.  His energy and intelligence could not fail to impress the powerful men with whom he was in this way brought into contact.  The affair increased his reputation, and made him more widely known than as a simple captain in the Navy he would otherwise have been.  As the various public Boards whose money had been stolen realized the amount of the thefts, and the extent of the conspiracy to rob the Government, they felt their obligations to him, and expressed them in formal, but warm, letters of thanks.  On the other hand, the principal culprits had command of both money and influence; and by means of these, as so often happens, they not only impeded inquiry, but, according to Southey, who wrote not very long after the events, “succeeded in raising prejudices against Nelson at the Board of Admiralty which it was many years before he could subdue.”  Clarke and M’Arthur make the same assertion.

That these prejudices did at one time exist is beyond doubt, and that they should have been fostered by this means is perfectly in keeping with common experience.  Such intrigues, however, work in the dark and by indirection; it is not often easy to trace their course.  The independence and single-mindedness with which Nelson followed his convictions, and the outspoken frankness with which he expressed his views and feelings, not improbably gave a handle to malicious misrepresentation.  His known intimacy with Prince William Henry, upon whose favor he to some extent relied, was also more likely to do him harm than good; and he entertained for the royal captain prepossessions not far removed from partisanship, at a time when the prince avowed himself not a friend to the present minister.  “Amidst that variety of business which demanded his attention on his return to England,” say his biographers, “he failed not, by every means in his power, to fulfil the promise which he had made to his Royal Highness Prince William of counteracting whatever had been opposed to the merited reputation of his illustrious pupil, and to the friendship they had invariably preserved for each other.”  It was a difficult task.  Opinionated and headstrong as the King, his father, the young man was an uneasy subordinate to the Admiralty, and made those above him realize that he was full as conscious of his personal rank as of his official position as a captain in the Navy.  It was, indeed, this self-assertive temperament that afterwards frustrated his natural ambition to be the active head of the service.  Having such an ally, there is something ominous for Nelson’s