seventy-four-gun ship as soon as it was in his power to do so, and
that meanwhile, if he chose to take a sixty-four, he could have one as
soon as she was ready. On the 30th he was appointed to the
"Agamemnon," of the latter rate. Within the preceding fortnight Louis
XVI. had been beheaded, and the French ambassador ordered to leave
England. On February 1, 1793, two days after Nelson's orders were
issued, the Republic declared war against Great Britain and Holland.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Nicolas, vol. v. p. 356.

[9] Thus Collingwood, rarely other than sober and restrained in his
language, wrote to Hughes: "It is from the idea that the greatness and
superiority of the British navy very much depends upon preserving inviolate
the Act of Navigation, excluding foreigners from access to the colonies,
that I am induced to make this representation to you." Nicolas, vol. i. p.
172.

[10] Nelson's letters are contradictory on this point. In a letter to
Locker of March 3, 1786, he says, "Before the first vessel was tried I had
seized four others;" whereas in the formal and detailed narrative drawn
up--without date, but later than the letter to Locker--he says the first
vessel was tried and condemned May 17, the other four seized May 23.
(Nicolas, vol. i. pp. 177, 178.) The author has followed the latter,
because from the particularity of dates it seems to have been compiled from
memoranda, that of Locker written from memory,--both nearly a year after
the events.

[11] This word is used by Nelson, apparently, as equivalent to
"season,"--the cruising period in the West Indies. "The admiral wishes to
remain another station," he writes elsewhere.

[12] Lady Nelson's tombstone in Littleham Churchyard, Exmouth, reads that
she died May 6, 1831, "aged 73." She would then have been born before May
6, 1758. Nicolas (vol. i. p. 217) says that she died May 4, 1831, aged 68,
but does not mention his authority.

[13] Prior to May, 1785, the only stops of the "Boreas" at Nevis were
January 6-8, February 1-4, and March 11-15. (Boreas's Log in Nicolas's
Letters and Despatches of Lord Nelson, vol. vii. Addenda, pp. viii, ix.)

[14] The author is satisfied, from casual expressions in Nelson's letters
to Lady Hamilton, that his famous two years' confinement to the ship,
1803-1805, and, to a less extent, the similar seclusion practised in the
Baltic and the Downs, proceeded, in large part at least, from a romantic
and chivalrous resolve to leave n