is gazette the loud homage of every mouth in
Europe,--not till six months after the battle of the Nile,--did Nelson
write: "There is no true happiness in this life, and in my present
state I could quit it with a smile. My only wish is to sink with
honour into the grave."

The preparation of the Mediterranean fleet, to which the "Agamemnon"
was assigned, was singularly protracted, and in the face of a
well-ordered enemy the delay must have led to disastrous results.
Nelson himself joined his ship at Chatham on the 7th of February, a
week after his orders were issued; but not until the 16th of March did
she leave the dockyard, and then only for Sheerness, where she
remained four weeks longer. By that time it seems probable, from
remarks in his letters, that the material equipment of the vessel was
complete; but until the 14th of April she remained over a hundred men
short of her complement. "Yet, I think," wrote Nelson, "that we shall
be far from ill-manned, even if the rest be not so good as they ought
to be." Mobilization in those days had not been perfected into a
science, even in theory, and the difficulty of raising crews on the
outbreak of war was experienced by all nations, but by none more than
by Great Britain. Her wants were greatest, and for supply depended
upon a merchant service scattered in all quarters of the globe. "Men
are very hard to be got," Nelson said to his brother, "and without a
press I have no idea that our fleet can be manned." It does not appear
that this crude and violent, yet unavoidable, method was employed for
the "Agamemnon," except so far as her crew was completed from the
guard-ship. Dependence was placed upon the ordinary wiles of the
recruiting-sergeant, and upon Nelson's own popularity in the adjacent
counties of Suffolk and Norfolk, from which the bulk of his ship's
company was actually drawn. "I have sent out a lieutenant and four
midshipmen," he writes to Locker, "to get men at every seaport in
Norfolk, and to forward them to Lynn and Yarmouth; my friends in
Yorkshire and the North tell me they will send what men they can lay
hands on;" but at the same time he hopes that Locker, then
Commander-in-chief at the Nore, will not turn away any who from other
districts may present themselves for the "Agamemnon." Coming mainly
from the same neighborhood gave to the crew a certain homogeneousness
of character, affording ground for appeal to local pride, a most
powerful incentive in moments