ich cannot always be soon
brought to a conclusion: and, while these are transacting, an attention
to other occurrences, of more or less magnitude, becomes perpetually
requisite; which are, in their turn, subjected to similar
procrastinating delays and necessarily diverted attentions.

The cares of Lord Nelson can hardly be said to have one minute ceased,
even when he landed, in safety, at Palermo, the royal and illustrious
characters, and their immense treasure, which he had successfully
conveyed thither, amidst such alarming difficulties and dangers. His
anxious bosom, it is true, was now relieved from the apprehensions which
it had suffered during the storm; and felt, no doubt, as it ought, a
sympathetic sense of the grateful felicitations of beloved friends, on
the event of their happy arrival at a place of secure refuge. He could
not, indeed, fail to rejoice in their joy: but it was, with all of them,
a joy mingled with melancholy; and, with him, it was particularly so.

An intellectual tempest, at this apparently enviable period of our
hero's glory, was violently agitating the secret recesses of his too
susceptible heart. Justly jealous of honour, his soul ever kindled with
alarm at the most remote idea of aught that could, by any possibility of
implication, be considered as having the smallest tendency to sully or
impair a single particle of that celestial inheritance which he felt
conscious of having a legitimate right to possess in undiminished
lustre, If it should be thought, by the more calmly philosophical mind,
that he might sometimes too soon take the alarm; let it, at least, not
fail to be remembered, that the true votary of honour must never be,
even once, a single moment too late.

The reader who has attentively perused the preceding part of Lord
Nelson's history, will long since have discovered, that one grand trait
of character, in this exalted man, was a determined resolution of
accomplishing, to it's fullest possible extent, the business, whatever
it might be, which was once committed to his charge; and that, in every
expedition, it formed his chief pride, to effect even more than could
have been expected, by those who had, from the greatest possible
confidence in his skill and ability, selected him for the enterprise. It
was this invariable principle that, by prompting him to serve on shore,
at the batteries before Calvi, cost him the vision of an eye; and it was
to this same cause, that he owed t