Before Nelson received his leave he had begun to change his mind about going home.  This was due, partly, to a slight betterment in his health, which he at this time mentions; chiefly, it would seem, to the prospects of a Spanish war.  This, by doubling the number of his enemies and the quarters whence they might come, contributed to the pleasurable excitement that was always a tonic to his physical frame, and roused the eager desire for conspicuous action, which was his most prominent passion.  Indications also assured him that the expectation of the French coming out, in which appearances had so often deceived him, was now on the point of being realized; that Bonaparte’s projects, whatever they were, were approaching maturity.  His “guess,” founded on the reports before him, was wonderfully penetrative.  He did not see all the way through the French mill-stone, but he saw very deep into it; his inference, indeed, was one in which intuition and sagacity bore equal shares.  “If the Russians continue increasing their naval force in this country [that is, in the eastern Mediterranean], I do not think the French will venture to the eastward; therefore, I rather expect they will, as the year advances, try to get out of the straits; and should they accomplish it with 7,000 troops on board, I am sure we should lose half our West India Islands, for I think they would go there, and not to Ireland.  Whatever may be their destination, I shall certainly follow, be it even to the East Indies.”  The last allusion is interesting, for it shows the wide flight of his speculations, which had found utterance before in the casual remark that his ships were provisioned for a voyage to Madras; and, even as a guess, it struck perilously near one of Bonaparte’s purposes.  The splendid decision, formulated so long before the case arose, to follow wherever they went, held in its womb the germ of the great campaign of Trafalgar; while in the surmise that the Toulon fleet was bound to the West Indies, the arrow of conjecture had gone straight to the bull’s-eye.

In this same letter, addressed to General Villettes, at Malta, formerly his coadjutor at the siege of Bastia, Nelson, in the intimacy of friendship, reveals what was to him at once the secret of health and the fulfilment of desire; the congenial atmosphere in which his being throve, and expanded to fulfil the limits of his genius.  “Such a pursuit would do more, perhaps, towards restoring me to health than all the doctors; but I fear” (his application for leave having gone in) “this is reserved for some happier man.  Not that I complain; I have had a good race of glory, but we are never satisfied, although I hope I am duly thankful for the past; but one cannot help, being at sea, longing for a little more.”  “I hope,” he had written a few months earlier to Lord Minto, “some day, very soon, to fulfil the warmest wishes of my Country and expectations of my friends.  I hope you may be able, at some debate, to say, as your partiality has said before, ‘Nelson has done more than he has done before;’ I can assure you it shall be a stimulus to my exertion on the day of battle....  Whatever happens, I have run a glorious race.”