The incident singularly and aptly illustrates the difference, which in a military service cannot be too carefully kept in mind, between individual expressions of opinion, which may be biassed, and professional reputation, which, like public sentiment, usually settles at last not far from the truth.  Despite this curious inversion of the facts by Lord Hood, there probably was no one among the naval forces, nor among the soldiery, who did not thoroughly, if perchance somewhat vaguely, appreciate that Nelson was the moving spirit of the whole operation, even beyond Hood himself.  As the Greek commanders after Salamis were said to have voted the award of merit each to himself first, but all to Themistocles second, so at Bastia, whatever value individuals might place on their own services, all probably would have agreed that Nelson came next.

The latter meantime was happily unconscious of the wrong done him, so that nothing marred the pleasure with which he congratulated the commander-in-chief, and received the latter’s brief but hearty general order of thanks, wherein Nelson’s own name stood foremost, as was due both to his seniority and to his exertions.  When the despatch reached him, he freely expressed his discontent in letters to friends; but being, at the time of its reception, actively engaged in the siege of Calvi, the exhilaration of that congenial employment for the moment took the edge off the keenness of his resentment.  “Lord Hood and myself were never better friends—­nor, although his Letter does,[21] did he wish to put me where I never was—­in the rear.  Captain Hunt, who lost his ship, he wanted to push forward for another,—­a young man who never was on a battery, or ever rendered any service during the siege; if any person ever says he did, then I submit to the character of a story-teller.  Poor Serocold, who fell here,[22] was determined to publish an advertisement, as he commanded a battery under my orders.  The whole operations of the siege were carried on through Lord Hood’s letters to me.  I was the mover of it—­I was the cause of its success.  Sir Gilbert Elliot will be my evidence, if any is required.  I am not a little vexed, but shall not quarrel.”  “I am well aware,” he had written to Mrs. Nelson a few days before, “my poor services will not be noticed:  I have no interest; but, however services may be received, it is not right in an officer to slacken his zeal for his Country.”

These noble words only voiced a feeling which in Nelson’s heart had all the strength of a principle; and this light of the single eye stood him in good stead in the moments of bitterness which followed a few months later, when a lull in the storm of fighting gave the sense of neglect a chance to rankle.  “My heart is full,” he writes then to his uncle Suckling, speaking not only of Bastia, but of the entire course of operations in Corsica, “when I think of the treatment I have received:  every man who had any considerable share in the reduction has got