Hamilton, who exercised so marked an influence over his later life; but, though she was still in the prime of her singular loveliness, being yet under thirty, not a ripple stirred the surface of his soul, afterward so powerfully perturbed by this fascinating woman.  “Lady Hamilton,” he writes to his wife, “has been wonderfully kind and good to Josiah [his stepson].  She is a young woman of amiable manners, and who does honour to the station to which she is raised.”  His mind was then too full of what was to be done; not as after the Nile, when, unstrung by reaction from the exhausting emotions of the past months, it was for the moment empty of aspiration and cloyed with flattery only.

The prospect of sailing with the convoy of troops, as well as of a few days’ repose for the wearied ship’s company, was cut short by the news that a French ship of war, with some merchant vessels in convoy, had anchored on the Sardinian coast.  Although there were at Naples several Neapolitan naval vessels, and one Spaniard, none of them moved; and as the Prime Minister sent the information to Nelson, he felt bound to go, though but four days in port.  “Unfit as my ship was, I had nothing left for the honour of our country but to sail, which I did in two hours afterwards.  It was necessary to show them what an English man-of-war would do.”  The expected enemy was not found, and, after stretching along the coast in a vain search, the “Agamemnon” put into Leghorn on the 25th of September, nine days after leaving Naples,—­to “absolutely save my poor fellows,” wrote her captain to his brother.  But even so, he purposed staying at his new anchorage but three days, “for I cannot bear the thought of being absent from the scene of action” at Toulon.  In the same letter he mentions that since the 23d of April—­five months—­the ship had been at anchor only twenty days.

The unwavering resolution and prompt decision of his character thus crop out at every step.  In Leghorn he found a large French frigate, which had been on the point of sailing when his ship came in sight.  “I am obliged to keep close watch to take care he does not give me the slip, which he is inclined to do.  I shall pursue him, and leave the two Courts [Great Britain and Tuscany] to settle the propriety of the measure, which I think will not be strictly regular.  Have been up all night watching him—­ready to cut the moment he did.”  The enemy, however, made no movement, and Nelson was not prepared to violate flagrantly the neutrality of the port.  On the 30th of September he sailed, and on the 5th of October rejoined Lord Hood off Toulon, where four thousand of the Neapolitan troops, for which he had negotiated, had already arrived.