tinguished talent were no protection
at the bar of a special tribunal, with a low-born monster at its head,
not surpassed in its atrocities by the revolutionary tyrants of Paris
and of Lyons. The ships shared the infamy; the venerable and noble
Caraccioli, seventy-five years of age, himself an admiral, was the first
_piaculum_! Summarily condemned by a court-martial _held on board
Nelson's flag-ship_, he was executed like a felon, and cast overboard
from a Neapolitan frigate floating on the same anchorage, and subject to
the same authority!

But Nelson's star was then in the ascendant; the presence and notorious
influence of Emma Hamilton in these frightful transactions, was
unaccountably connived at by the British nation. The officer who has
been a party to a convention, which his commander-in-chief thinks proper
not only to disapprove but to violate, must inevitably suffer in that
fame and popularity which our public services so justly cherish. And in
the state of men's passions during that memorable war, _so that it were
against the French, a successful_ commander-in-chief could do no wrong!
Yet here, probably, the matter would have rested; but when, nine years
afterwards, _Stanier Clarke_ so little appreciated the duty of a
biographer as to relate a transaction susceptible of no excuse, in terms
unjustified by the facts, and sought to render his hero _immaculate_ at
the _expense of others_, the excellent officer whose feelings and
character had been so cruelly sacrificed, felt himself compelled at last
to publish his "Vindication," judicious in every thing but _the title_.
He most properly printed the _Convention itself_ in the original words,
and with all the signatures it bore. Such works, however, even when the
affairs they refer to are _recent_, are never read but by _friends_--or
_enemies_. A late atonement was made by William IV. in conferring on Sir
Edward Foote a titular distinction, which the public heed not; but the
tables are now turned, and Europe, taught by Cuoco, Coletta, and by
Botta, the great historian of Italy, has irrevocably closed this _great
account_. The name of Foote is recorded in all their pages in terms
which, had he seen them, might well have consoled him for the past;
while the last and most popular biographer of Nelson (Southey) feels
himself compelled to admit, and the frank admission does him infinite
honour, that this is a passage of his hero's life which the muse of
history "must _r