A few days later there was again a dinner at the house taken by the Hamiltons in Grosvenor Square.  The Nelsons were there, as was Miss Knight.  The next day several of the party attended the theatre, and Lady Nelson, it is said, fainted in the box, overcome by feeling, many thought, at her husband’s marked attentions to Lady Hamilton.  The latter being in her way a character as well known as Nelson himself, the affair necessarily became more than usually a matter of comment, especially as the scene now provided for London gossipers was a re-presentation of that so long enacted at Palermo, and notorious throughout Europe; but it was received with little toleration.  “Most of my friends,” wrote Miss Knight, “were urgent with me to drop the acquaintance, but, circumstanced as I had been, I feared the charge of ingratitude, though greatly embarrassed as to what to do, for things became very unpleasant.”  Had it been a new development, it would have presented little difficulty; but as she had quietly lived many months in the minister’s house under the same conditions, only in the more congenial atmosphere of Palermo, it was not easy now to join in the disapproval shown by much of London society.

Lady Hamilton, of course, could not have any social acceptance, but even towards Nelson himself, in all his glory, a marked coldness was shown in significant quarters.  “The Lady of the Admiralty,” wrote he to his friend Davison, “never had any just cause for being cool to me;” an allusion probably to Lady Spencer, the wife of the First Lord.  Coldness from her must have been the more marked, for after the Nile she had written him a wildly enthusiastic letter, recognizing with gratitude the distinction conferred upon her husband’s administration by the lustre of that battle.  “Either as a public or private man,” he continued, “I wish nothing undone which I have done,”—­a remark entirely ambiguous and misleading as regards his actual relations to Lady Hamilton.  He told Collingwood, at this same time, that he had not been well received by the King.  “He gave me an account of his reception at Court,” his old comrade writes, “which was not very flattering, after having been the adoration of that of Naples.  His Majesty merely asked him if he had recovered his health; and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to General——­, and talked to him near half an hour in great good humour.  It could not be about his successes.”  This slight was not a revival of the old prejudice entertained by the King before the war, which had been wholly removed by the distinguished services Nelson had rendered afterwards.  Eighteen months before this Davison had written to him:  “I waited upon the King early last Sunday morning, and was alone with him a full hour, when much of the conversation was about you.  It is impossible to express how warmly he spoke of you, and asked me a thousand questions about you ...  I have been again at the Queen’s house, and have