found to disappoint.  Happiness was his then, as at no other time before or after; for the surrounding conditions of enterprise, of difficulties to be overcome, and dangers to be met, were in complete correspondence with those native powers that had so long struggled painfully for room to exert themselves.  His health revived, and his very being seemed to expand in this congenial atmosphere, which to him was as life from the dead.  As with untiring steps he sped onward and upward,—­counting naught done while aught remained to do, forgetting what was behind as he pressed on to what was before,—­the ardor of pursuit, the delight of achievement, the joy of the giant running his course, sustained in him that glow of animation, that gladness in the mere fact of existence, physical or moral, in which, if anywhere, this earth’s content is found.  Lack of recognition, even, wrung from him only the undaunted words:  “Never mind! some day I will have a gazette of my own.”  Not till his dreams were realized, till aspiration had issued in the completest and most brilliant triumph ever wrought upon the seas, and he had for his gazette the loud homage of every mouth in Europe,—­not till six months after the battle of the Nile,—­did Nelson write:  “There is no true happiness in this life, and in my present state I could quit it with a smile.  My only wish is to sink with honour into the grave.”

The preparation of the Mediterranean fleet, to which the “Agamemnon” was assigned, was singularly protracted, and in the face of a well-ordered enemy the delay must have led to disastrous results.  Nelson himself joined his ship at Chatham on the 7th of February, a week after his orders were issued; but not until the 16th of March did she leave the dockyard, and then only for Sheerness, where she remained four weeks longer.  By that time it seems probable, from remarks in his letters, that the material equipment of the vessel was complete; but until the 14th of April she remained over a hundred men short of her complement.  “Yet, I think,” wrote Nelson, “that we shall be far from ill-manned, even if the rest be not so good as they ought to be.”  Mobilization in those days had not been perfected into a science, even in theory, and the difficulty of raising crews on the outbreak of war was experienced by all nations, but by none more than by Great Britain.  Her wants were greatest, and for supply depended upon a merchant service scattered in all quarters of the globe.  “Men are very hard to be got,” Nelson said to his brother, “and without a press I have no idea that our fleet can be manned.”  It does not appear that this crude and violent, yet unavoidable, method was employed for the “Agamemnon,” except so far as her crew was completed from the guard-ship.  Dependence was placed upon the ordinary wiles of the recruiting-sergeant, and upon Nelson’s own popularity in the adjacent counties of Suffolk and Norfolk, from which the bulk of his ship’s company was actually