Nelson returned to the Downs, bitterly grieved, but not greatly discouraged.  The mishap, he said, was due to the boats not arriving at the same moment; and that, he knew, was caused by conditions of currents, which would ever prevent the dull flatboats of the enemy moving in a concert that the cutters of ships of war had not attained.  “The craft which I have seen,” he wrote, “I do not think it possible to row to England; and sail they cannot.”  As yet, however, he had not visited Flushing, and he felt it necessary to satisfy himself on that point.  On the 24th of August, taking some pilots with him, he went across and inspected the ground, where the officer in charge of the British observing squadron was confident something might be effected.  Nelson, however, decided otherwise.  “I cannot but admire Captain Owen’s zeal in his anxious desire to get at the enemy, but I am afraid it has made him overleap sand-banks and tides, and laid him aboard the enemy.  I could join most heartily in his desire; but we cannot do impossibilities, and I am as little used to find out the impossibles as most folks; and I think I can discriminate between the impracticable and the fair prospect of success.”  By the 27th of August he had returned to the Downs, where, with a brief and unimportant intermission, he remained until the cessation of hostilities with France in October.

Satisfied that invasion was, for that year at least, an empty menace, Nelson fell again into the tone of angry and fretful complaint which was so conspicuous in the last weeks of his stay in the Baltic.  To borrow the words of a French admirer, “He filled the Admiralty with his caprices and Europe with his fame.”  Almost from his first contact with this duty, it had been distasteful to him.  “There is nothing to be done on the great scale,” he said.  “I own, my dear Lord,” he told St. Vincent, “that this boat warfare is not exactly congenial to my feelings, and I find I get laughed at for my puny mode of attack.”  As usual, he threw himself with all his might into what he had to do, but the inward friction remained.  “Whilst I serve, I will do it actively, and to the very best of my abilities.  I have all night had a fever, which is very little abated this morning; my mind carries me beyond my strength, and will do me up; but such is my nature.  I require nursing like a child.”

That he was far from well is as unquestionable as that his distemper proceeded largely from his mind, if it did not originate there.  “Our separation is terrible,” he writes to Lady Hamilton; “my heart is ready to flow out of my eyes.  I am not unwell, but I am very low.  I can only account for it by my absence from all I hold dear in this world.”  From the first he had told St. Vincent that he could not stay longer than September 14th, that it was beyond his strength to stand the equinoctial weather.  The veteran seaman showed towards him the same delicate consideration that he always had,