given the King a copy of your last letter to me, giving an account of your health, which he read twice over, with great attention, and with apparent emotion of concern.  His Majesty speaks of you with the tenderness of a father.”  Samuel Rogers has an incidental mention of the effect produced upon Nelson by the treatment now experienced.  “I heard him once during dinner utter many bitter complaints (which Lady Hamilton vainly attempted to check) of the way he had been treated at Court that forenoon:  the Queen had not condescended to take the slightest notice of him.  In truth, Nelson was hated at Court; they were jealous of his fame."[15] People, however, are rarely jealous of those who are not rivals.

The position which Nelson had proposed to himself to establish was of course impossible.  The world was no more disposed to worry about any private immoralities of his than it did about those of other men, but it was not prepared to have them brandished in its face, and it would have none of Lady Hamilton,—­nor would Lady Nelson.  The general public opinion at the time receives, probably, accurate expression from Sir William Hotham, a man then in London society.  “His vanity, excusable as such a foible is in such a man, led him to unpardonable excesses, and blinded him to the advantages of being respected in society....  His conduct to Lady Nelson was the very extreme of unjustifiable weakness, for he should at least have attempted to conceal his infirmities, without publicly wounding the feelings of a woman whose own conduct he well knew was irreproachable."[16] On the other hand, Nelson could not forget the kindnesses he had accepted from Lady Hamilton, nor was he either able or willing to lessen an intimacy which, unless diminished, left the scandal unabated.  He was not able, for a man of his temperament could not recede before opposition, or slight a woman now compromised by his name; and he was not willing, for he was madly in love.  Being daily with her for seven months after leaving Palermo, there occurs a break in their correspondence; but when it was resumed in the latter part of January, 1801, every particle of the reticence which a possible struggle with conscience had imposed disappears.  He has accepted the new situation, cast aside all restraints, and his language at times falls little short of frenzy, while belying the respect for her which he asserts continually and aggressively, as though against his convictions.

The breach with Lady Nelson had in this short time become final.  We have not the means—­happily—­to trace through its successive stages a rapid process of estrangement, of which Nelson said a few months afterwards:  “Sooner than live the unhappy life I did when last I came to England, I would stay abroad forever.”  A highly colored account is given in Harrison’s Life of Nelson, emanating apparently from Lady Hamilton, of the wretchedness the hero experienced from the temper of his wife; while in the “Memoirs of Lady Hamilton,”