On the 22d of October, 1801, he left the flagship and set off for his new home in Surrey.

FOOTNOTES: 

[37] These suggestive italics are in the letter as printed by Clarke and M’Arthur, and reproduced by Nicolas.

[38] Hollesley Bay.

CHAPTER XVIII.

RELEASE FROM ACTIVE SERVICE DURING THE PEACE OF AMIENS.—­HOME LIFE AT MERTON.—­PUBLIC INCIDENTS.

OCTOBER, 1801—­MAY, 1803.  AGE, 43-44.

During the brief interval between his return from the Baltic, July I,1801, and his taking command of the Squadron on a Particular Service, on the 27th of the same month, Nelson had made his home in England with the Hamiltons, to whose house in Piccadilly he went immediately upon his arrival in London.  Whatever doubt may have remained in his wife’s mind, as to the finality of their parting in the previous January, or whatever trace of hesitation may then have existed in his own, had been definitively removed by letters during his absence.  To her he wrote on the 4th of March, immediately before the expedition sailed from Yarmouth:  “Josiah[39] is to have another ship and to go abroad, if the Thalia cannot soon be got ready.  I have done all for him, and he may again, as he has often done before, wish me to break my neck, and be abetted in it by his friends, who are likewise my enemies; but I have done my duty as an honest, generous man, and I neither want or wish for anybody to care what becomes of me, whether I return, or am left in the Baltic.  Living, I have done all in my power for you, and if dead, you will find I have done the same; therefore my only wish is, to be left to myself:  and wishing you every happiness, believe that I am, your affectionate Nelson and Bronte.”  Upon this letter Lady Nelson endorsed:  “This is My Lord Nelson’s Letter of dismissal, which so astonished me that I immediately sent it to Mr. Maurice Nelson,[40] who was sincerely attached to me, for his advice.  He desired me not to take the least notice of it, as his brother seemed to have forgot himself.”

A separation preceded and caused by such circumstances as this was, could not fail to be attended with bitterness on both sides; yet one could have wished to see in a letter which is believed, and probably was intended, to be the last ever addressed by him to her, some recollection, not only of what he himself had done for his stepson, but that once, to use his own expression, “the boy” had “saved his life;” and that, after all, if he was under obligations to Nelson, he would have been more than youth, had no intemperance of expression mingled with the resentment he felt for the slights offered his mother in the face of the world.  With Nelson’s natural temperament and previous habits of thought, however, it was imperative, for his peace of mind, to justify his course of action to himself; and this he could