For such a treatment of Nelson’s character, copious, if imperfect, material is afforded in his extensive and varied correspondence.  From it the author aims, first, to draw forth a distinct and living image of the man himself, as sketched therein at random and loosely by his own hand.  It is sought to reach the result by keeping the reader in constant contact, as by daily acquaintance, with a personality of mingled weakness and strength, of grave faults as well as of great virtues, but one whose charm was felt in life by all who knew it.  The second object, far less ambitious, is to present a clear narrative of the military career, of the mighty deeds of arms, of this first of British seamen, whom the gifts of Nature and the course of History have united to make, in his victories and in their results, the representative figure of the greatest sea-power that the world has known.

It will not be thought surprising that we have, of the first thirty years of Nelson’s life, no such daily informal record as that which illustrates the comparatively brief but teeming period of his active fighting career, from 1793 to 1805, when he at once, with inevitable directness and singular rapidity, rose to prominence, and established intimate relations with numbers of his contemporaries.  A few anecdotes, more or less characteristic, have been preserved concerning his boyhood and youth.  In his early manhood we have his own account, both explicit and implied in many casual unpremeditated phrases, of the motives which governed his public conduct in an episode occurring when, scarcely yet more than a youth, he commanded a frigate in the West Indies,—­the whole singularly confirmatory, it might better be said prophetic, of the distinguishing qualities afterwards so brilliantly manifested in his maturity.  But beyond these, it is only by the closest attention and careful gleaning that can be found, in the defective and discontinuous collection of letters which remains from his first thirty years, the indisputable tokens, in most important particulars, of the man that was to be.

The external details of this generally uneventful period can be rapidly summarized.  He was born on the 29th of September, 1758, the fifth son and sixth child of Edmund Nelson, then rector of the parish of Burnham Thorpe, in Norfolk, a county which lies along the eastern coast of England, bordering the North Sea.  His mother, whose name before marriage was Catherine Suckling, was grandniece to Sir Robert Walpole, the famous prime minister of Great Britain during twenty years of the reigns of the first two Georges.  Sir Robert’s second brother was called Horatio; and it was from the latter, or from his son, that the future hero took his baptismal name, which, in a more common form, was also that of Sir Robert’s younger son, the celebrated letter and memoir writer, Horace Walpole.