[15] The author has italicized these words because they accurately express the just penalty that military law would have required of Nelson, had he not shown adequate grounds for his disobedience.  They measure, therefore, the responsibility he shouldered, and the reward he deserved.

[16] Sir Harris Nicolas (Nelson’s Despatches and Letters, vol. i. p. 217) gives March 12 as the day of the wedding, upon the ground of a letter of Lady Nelson’s.  Her mention of the date is, however, rather casual; and March 11 is given in the parish register of the church in Nevis.

[17] The same symptom will be noted in the anxious pursuit of Villeneuve to the West Indies in 1805, where he grew better, although for some months he had had in his hands the Admiralty’s permission to return home on account of his health.

CHAPTER III.

NELSON’S DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND IN THE “AGAMEMNON.”—­SERVICES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN UNTIL THE RECOVERY OF TOULON BY THE FRENCH.—­LORD HOOD IN COMMAND.

FEBRUARY-DECEMBER, 1793.  AGE, 34.

Nelson’s page in history covers a little more than twelve years, from February, 1793, to October, 1805.  Its opening coincides with the moment when the wild passions of the French Revolution, still at fiercest heat, and which had hitherto raged like flame uncontrolled, operative only for destruction, were being rapidly mastered, guided, and regulated for efficient work, by the terrors of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety.  In the object to which these tremendous forces were now about to be applied lay the threat to the peace of Europe, which aroused Great Britain to action, and sent into the field her yet unknown champion from the Norfolk parsonage.  The representatives of the French people had imparted to the original movement of their nation,—­which aimed only at internal reforms, however radical,—­a new direction, of avowed purposeful aggression upon all political institutions exterior to, and differing from, their own.  This became the one characteristic common to the successive forms of government, which culminated in the pure military despotism of Napoleon.

To beat back that spirit of aggression was the mission of Nelson.  Therein is found the true significance of his career, which mounts higher and higher in strenuous effort and gigantic achievement, as the blast of the Revolution swells fiercer and stronger under the mighty impulse of the great Corsican.  At each of the momentous crises, so far removed in time and place,—­at the Nile, at Copenhagen, at Trafalgar,—­as the unfolding drama of the age reveals to the onlooker the schemes of the arch-planner about to touch success, over against Napoleon rises ever Nelson; and as the latter in the hour of victory drops upon the stage where he has played so chief a part, his task is seen to be accomplished, his triumph secured.  In the very act of dying he has dealt the foe a blow from which recovery is impossible.  Moscow and Waterloo are the inevitable consequences of Trafalgar; as the glories of that day were but the fit and assured ending of the illustrious course which was begun upon the quarter-deck of the “Agamemnon.”