but he hoped to attain the same end by the frigates off the Hyeres.  “I really am of opinion,” he told their commander, “that it will force La Touche out.”  In the latter, however, he had to do with an opponent of skill as well as of resolution.  Firmly imbued with the French tradition, and with Bonaparte’s instructions, which subordinated his local action entirely to the great scheme in which the Toulon fleet had its appointed part, Latouche Treville was neither to be provoked nor betrayed into an action, by which, however tempting the promise, his fleet might be made unfit for their intended service.  Nelson did him no more than justice, when he said, “I am confident, when he is ordered for any service, that he will risk falling in with us, and the event of a battle, to try and accomplish his orders;” but, short of the appointed time, nothing else could entice him.  In vain did the British admiral bait his trap by exposing frigates, without visible support, to draw him to leeward, while the hostile fleet hovered out of sight to windward.  The shrewd Frenchman doubtless felt the temptation, but he distrusted the gifts too plausibly tendered.

Besides the interest of the public service, Nelson had the strongest personal motives for bringing matters to an issue.  The prolonged suspense and the anxiety were exhausting him, the steady tension even of the normal conditions fretted him beyond endurance; but when a crisis became accentuated by an appearance that the enemy had eluded him, his feelings of distress, acting upon an enfeebled organization, and a nervous temperament so sensitive that he started at the mere dropping of a rope beside him, drove him almost to distraction.  On such an occasion he wrote:  “I am absolutely beginning this letter in a fever of the mind.  It is thick as butter-milk, and blowing a Levanter; and the Narcissus has just spoke me to say, ’she boarded a vessel, and they understood that the men had seen, a few days before, twelve sail of ships of war off Minorca.  It was in the dusk, and he did not know which way they were steering.’  This is the whole story, and a lame one.  You will imagine my feelings, although I cannot bring my mind to believe.  To miss them, God forbid....  If I should miss these fellows, my heart will break:  I am actually only now recovering the shock of missing them in 1798.  God knows I only serve to fight those scoundrels; and if I cannot do that, I should be better on shore.”  When the weather cleared, and a reconnoissance showed the news was false, his intense relief found expression in the words:  “I believe this is the only time in my life, that I was glad to hear the French were in port.”  “The French ships,” he says at another time, “have either altered their anchorage, or some of them have got to sea in the late gales:  the idea has given me half a fever.  If that admiral were to cheat me out of my hopes of meeting him, it would kill me much easier than one of his balls.  Since we sat down to dinner Captain Moubray has made the signal, but I am very far from being easy.”