A nearer approach to censure was soon to follow.  On the 9th of May, apparently before Nelson’s application for leave to return to England had been received, the Admiralty sent orders to Keith, that if his health rendered him incapable of doing his duty, he was to be permitted to return home by sea when opportunity offered, or by land if he preferred.  Earl Spencer wrote him at the same time a private letter, in which disapprobation was too thinly masked by carefully chosen words to escape attention:  “It is by no means my wish or intention to call you away from service, but having observed that you have been under the necessity of quitting your station off Malta, on account of your health, which I am persuaded you could not have thought of doing without such necessity, it appeared to me much more advisable for you to come home at once, than to be obliged to remain inactive at Palermo, while active service was going on in other parts of the station.  I should still much prefer your remaining to complete the reduction of Malta, which I flatter myself cannot be very far distant, and I still look with anxious expectation to the Guillaume Tell striking to your flag.  But if, unfortunately, these agreeable events are to be prevented, by your having too much exhausted yourself in the service to be equal to follow them up, I am quite clear, and I believe I am joined in opinion by all your friends here, that you will be more likely to recover your health and strength in England than in an inactive situation at a Foreign Court, however pleasing the respect and gratitude shown to you for your services may be, and no testimonies of respect and gratitude from that Court to you can be, I am convinced, too great for the very essential services you have rendered it.  I trust that you will take in good part what I have taken the liberty to write to you as a friend.”

Both these letters reached Nelson in June, at Leghorn, on his way home.  The underlying censure did not escape him,—­“your two letters gave me much pain,” he replied,—­but he showed no traces of self-condemnation, or of regret for the past.  Lord Minto, who was now ambassador at Vienna, wrote thence in March of this year, before the question of going home was decided:  “I have letters from Nelson and Lady Hamilton.  It does not seem clear whether he will go home.  I hope he will not for his own sake, and he will at least, I hope, take Malta first.  He does not seem at all conscious of the sort of discredit he has fallen into, or the cause of it, for he still writes, not wisely, about Lady H. and all that.  But it is hard to condemn and use ill a hero, as he is in his own element, for being foolish about a woman who has art enough to make fools of many wiser than an admiral.”  Many years later, immediately after the parting which he did not then know was the last, Minto said of him, “He is in many points a really great man, in others a baby.”  Nelson himself, conscious of the diligence which he had used in the administration of his wide command and its varied interests, put out of court all other considerations of propriety.  “I trust you and all my friends will believe,” he told Spencer, “that mine cannot be an inactive life, although it may not carry all the outward parade of much ado about nothing.”