the battle.  If so, more shame for him to quit so many brave fellows. Here was no manoeuvring:  it was downright fighting, and it was his duty to have shown an example of firmness becoming the high trust reposed in him.”  This was probably a just comment, but not a fair implication of cowardice.  “He went in such a hurry, if he went before she struck, which but for his own declaration I can hardly believe, that he forgot to take his broad pendant with him.”  This Lindholm showed was a mistake.  “He seems to exult that I sent on shore a flag of truce.  Men of his description, if they ever are victorious, know not the feeling of humanity....  Mr. Fischer’s carcase was safe, and he regarded not the sacred call of humanity.”  This letter was sent to Lindholm, to be communicated to the Crown Prince; for, had not Fischer addressed the latter as an eye-witness, Nelson “would have treated his official letter with the contempt it deserved.”  Lindholm kept it from Fischer, made a temperate reply defending the latter, and the subject there dropped.

On the 25th of April the fleet was at anchor in Kioge Bay, and there remained until the 5th of May, when orders arrived relieving Parker, and placing Nelson in chief command.  The latter was utterly dismayed.  Side by side with the unquenchable zeal for glory and for his Country’s service had been running the equally unquenchable passion for Lady Hamilton; and, with the noble impulses that bore him up in battle, sickness, and exposure, had mingled soft dreams of flight from the world, of days spent upon the sunny slopes of Sicily, on his estate of Bronte, amid scenes closely resembling those associated with his past delights, and with the life of the woman whom he loved.  To this he several times alludes in the almost daily letters which he wrote her.  But, whether to be realized there or in England, he panted for the charms of home which he had never known.  “I am fixed,” he tells her, “to live a country life, and to have many (I hope) years of comfort, which God knows, I never yet had—­only moments of happiness,”—­a pathetic admission of the price he had paid for the glory which could not satisfy him, yet which, by the law of his being, he could not cease to crave.  “I wish for happiness to be my reward, and not titles or money;” and happiness means being with her whom he repeatedly calls Santa Emma, and his “guardian angel,”—­a fond imagining, the sincerity of which checks the ready smile, but elicits no tenderness for a delusion too gross for sympathy.

Whatever sacrifices he might be ready to make for his country’s service, he was not willing to give up all he held dear when the real occasion for his exceptional powers had passed away; and the assurances that the service absolutely required his presence in the Baltic made no impression upon him.  He knew better.  “Had the command been given me in February,” he said, “many lives would have been saved, and we should have been in a very