The same could not then, nor for long before, be said of Nelson himself.  The first flush of excitement in leaving England and taking command, the expectation and change of scene in going out, affected him favorably.  “As to my health,” he says, immediately after joining the fleet, “thank God, I have not had a finger ache since I left England;” but this, unfortunately, did not endure.  It was his first experience of the weightier anxieties of a commander-in-chief; for when he had succeeded to that position, temporarily, in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, he had found either a squadron in good running order, or at the least no serious hitch about necessary maintenance.  Now all this was different.  The difficulties about supplies and the condition of his ships have been mentioned, as have also his fears for Naples, Sicily, and the Morea,—­all of which, in his belief, might possibly be conquered, even without the interposition of the Toulon fleet.  The latter, however, kept him most uneasy; for he could get no certain knowledge as to its destination, or the probable time of its moving; and the wide field for injury open to it, if his vigilance were eluded, kept his eager, unquiet mind continually on the strain of speculation and anticipation.  “I hope they will come out and let us settle the matter.  You know I hate being kept in suspense.”  The nervous excitability—­irritability—­that often overlay the usually cordial kindliness and gracious bearing of the man, was an easy prey to such harassment.  It breaks out at times in his letters, but was only occasionally visible to those around him.  By the first of December he already foresees that he cannot last long.  “Next Christmas, please God, I shall be at Merton; for, by that time, with all the anxiety attendant on such a command as this, I shall be done up.  The mind and body both wear out.”

As autumn drew towards winter, the bitter cold went through his feeble frame, and in the wild weather he was “always tossed about, and always sea-sick.”  “We have had a most terrible winter,” he writes, even before the New Year.  “It has almost knocked me up.  I have been very ill, and am now far from recovered; but I hope to hold out till the battle is over, when I must recruit.”  “My heart, my Lord, is warm,” he tells Lord Hobart, the Secretary of State for War, “my head is firm, but my body is unequal to my wishes.  I am visibly shook; but as long as I can hold out, I shall never abandon my truly honourable post.”  He feared also blindness.  “My eyesight fails me most dreadfully,” he writes to his old friend Davison.  “I firmly believe that, in a very few years, I shall be stone-blind.  It is this only, of all my maladies, that makes me unhappy; but God’s will be done.”  The first winter was unusually severe, and during it was added, to his official cares and personal suffering, an extreme anxiety about Lady Hamilton, for he was expecting the birth of a second child in January.  This child, a girl, lived but a short time; he never