As time passed, Sir William did not realize the comfort he had anticipated from surroundings so pleasant as those he described.  He was troubled in money matters, fearing lest he might be distressed to meet the current expenses of the house.  “If we had given up the house in Piccadilly,” he lamented to Greville, “the living here would indeed be a great saving; but, as it is, we spend neither more nor less than we did.”  Why he did not give it up does not appear.  As Lady Paramount over the owner of the place, Lady Hamilton insisted upon entertaining to a degree consonant to the taste neither of Lord Nelson, who was only too pleased to humor her whims, nor of her husband, who had an old man’s longing for quiet, and, besides, was not pleased to find himself relegated to a place in her consideration quite secondary to that of his host.  “It is but reasonable,” he wrote to Greville, in January, 1802, “after having fagged all my life, that my last days should pass off comfortably and quietly.  Nothing at present disturbs me but my debt, and the nonsense I am obliged to submit to here to avoid coming to an explosion, which would be attended with many disagreeable effects, and would totally destroy the comfort of the best man and the best friend I have in the world.  However, I am determined that my quiet shall not be disturbed, let the nonsensical world go on as it will.”

Neither the phlegm on which he prided himself, nor his resolutions, were sufficient, however, to keep the peace, or to avoid undignified contentions with his wife.  Some months later he addressed her a letter, which, although bearing no date, was evidently written after a prolonged experience of the conditions entailed upon himself by this odd partnership; for partnership it was, in form at least, the living expenses being divided between the two.[46] In their quiet reasonableness, his words are not without a certain dignified pathos, and they have the additional interest of proving, as far as words can prove, that, battered man of the world though he was, he had no suspicion, within a year of his death, that the relations between his host and his wife were guilty towards himself.

“I have passed the last 40 years of my life in the hurry & bustle that must necessarily be attendant on a publick character.  I am arrived at the age when some repose is really necessary, & I promised myself a quiet home, & altho’ I was sensible, & said so when I married, that I shou’d be superannuated when my wife wou’d be in her full beauty and vigour of youth.  That time is arrived, and we must make the best of it for the comfort of both parties.  Unfortunately our tastes as to the manner of living are very different.  I by no means wish to live in solitary retreat, but to have seldom less than 12 or 14 at table, and those varying continually, is coming back to what was become so irksome to me in Italy during the latter years of my residence in that country.  I have no connections out of my