ing influence was undoubtedly
Lord Keith. The doyen of the active list, and in command of the
Channel Fleet till he retired after the peace of 1815, he was
all-powerful as a naval authority, and his flag captain, Sir Graham
Moore, had just been given a seat on the board. A devout pupil of
St. Vincent and Howe, correct rather than brilliant, Keith represented
the old tradition, and notwithstanding the patience with which he had
borne Nelson's vagaries and insubordination, the antipathy between the
two men was never disguised. However generously Keith appreciated
Nelson's genius, he can only have regarded his methods as an evil
influence in the service for ordinary men, nor can there be much doubt
that his apprehensions had a good deal to justify them.

The general failure to grasp the whole of Nelson's tactical principles
was not the only trouble. There are signs that during the later years
of the war a very dangerous misunderstanding of his teaching had been
growing up in the service. In days when there was practically no
higher instruction in the theory of tactics, it was easy for officers
to forget how much prolonged and patient study had enabled Nelson to
handle his fleets with the freedom he did; and the tendency was to
believe that his successes could be indefinitely repeated by mere
daring and vehemence of attack. The seed was sown immediately after
the battle and by Collingwood himself. 'It was a severe action,' he
wrote to Admiral Parker on November 1, 'no dodging or manoeuvring.'
And again on December 16, to Admiral Pasley, 'Lord Nelson determined
to substitute for exact order an impetuous attack in two distinct
bodies.' Collingwood of course with all his limitations knew well
enough it was not a mere absence of manoeuvring that had won the
victory. In the same letter he had said that although Nelson
succeeded, as it were, by enchantment, it was all the effect of system
and nice combination.' Yet such phrases as he and others employed to
describe the headlong attack, taken from their context and repeated
from mouth to mouth, would soon have raised a false impression that
many men were only too ready to receive. So the seed must have grown,
till we find the fruit in Lord Dundonald's oft-quoted phrase, 'Never
mind manoeuvres: always go at them.' So it was that Nelson's teaching
had crystallised in his mind and in the mind perhaps of half the
service. The phrase is obviously a degradation of the opening
enunciati