Meantime the necessary preparations were quietly progressing, while the diplomatic discussions with France became more and more bitter and hopeless, turning mainly on the question of Malta, though the root of the trouble lay far deeper.  The “Victory,” of a hundred guns, was named for Nelson’s flag, her officers appointed, and the ship commissioned.  On the 6th of May he received orders to prepare for departure.  On the 12th the British ambassador left Paris, having handed in the Government’s ultimatum and demanded his passports.  On the 16th Great Britain declared war against France, and the same day Nelson at the Admiralty received his commission as commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean.  Within forty-eight hours he joined the “Victory” at Portsmouth, and on the 20th sailed for his station.

Thus ended the longest period of retirement enjoyed by Nelson, from the opening of the war with France, in 1793, until his death in 1805.  During it, besides the separation from Lady Nelson, two great breaks occurred in his personal ties and surroundings.  His father died at Bath on the 26th of April, 1802, at the age of seventy-nine.  There had been no breach in the love between the two, but it seems to the author impossible to overlook, in the guarded letters of the old man to his famous son, a tinge of regret and disapproval for the singular circumstances under which he saw fit to live.  That he gladly accepted the opinion professed by many friends, naval and others, and carefully fostered by the admiral, that his relations with Lady Hamilton were perfectly innocent, is wholly probable; but, despite the usual silence concerning his own views, observed by himself and Nelson, two clues to his thought and action appear in his letters.  One is the remark, already quoted, that gratitude required him to spend some of his time with Lady Nelson.  The other, singular and suggestive, is the casual mention to Nelson that he had received an anonymous letter, containing “severe reproaches for my conduct to you, which is such, it seems, as will totally separate us."[58] There is no record that he permitted himself to use direct expostulation, and it seems equally clear that he would not, by any implication, manifest approval or acquiescence.  It has been said, indeed, but only upon the authority of Lady Hamilton, that it was his intention to take up his residence entirely at Merton, with the admiral and the Hamiltons; an act which would have given express countenance to the existing arrangements, and disavowed, more strongly than any words, the bearing imputed to him by the anonymous letter.  In whose interest would such a letter most likely be penned?  Nelson mourned him sincerely, but was prevented by illness from being present at the funeral.  He is a man known to us only by his letters, which are marked by none of the originality that distinguishes the professional utterances of the admiral, and cannot be said to rise much above the commonplace; but they