rsenal of Toulon should be
delivered to him for safe keeping, until the restoration of the young
prince was effected. On the 27th of August the city ran up the white
flag of the Bourbons, and the British fleet, together with the
Spanish, which at this moment arrived on the scene, anchored in the
outer port. The allied troops took possession of the forts commanding
the harbor, while the dockyards and thirty ships-of-the-line were
delivered to the navies.

"The perseverance of our fleet has been great," wrote Nelson, "and to
that only can be attributed our unexampled success. Not even a boat
could get into Marseilles or Toulon, or on the coast, with provisions;
and the old saying, 'that hunger will tame a lion,' was never more
strongly exemplified." In this he deceived himself, however natural
the illusion. The opposition of Toulon to the Paris Government was
part of a general movement of revolt, which spread throughout the
provinces in May and June, 1793, upon the violent overthrow of the
Girondists in the National Convention. The latter then proclaimed
several cities outlawed, Toulon among them; and the bloody severities
it exercised were the chief determining cause of the sudden treason,
the offspring of fear more than of hunger,--though the latter
doubtless contributed,--which precipitated the great southern arsenal
into the arms of the Republic's most dangerous foe. Marseilles fell
before the Conventional troops, and the resultant panic in the sister
city occasioned the hasty step, which in less troubled moments would
have been regarded with just horror. But in truth Nelson, despite his
acute military perceptions, had not yet developed that keen political
sagacity, the fruit of riper judgment grounded on wider information,
which he afterwards showed. His ambition was yet limited to the sphere
of the "Agamemnon," his horizon bounded by the petty round of the
day's events. He rose, as yet, to no apprehension of the mighty crisis
hanging over Europe, to no appreciation of the profound meanings of
the opening strife. "I hardly think the War can last," he writes to
his wife, "for what are we at war about?" and again, "I think we shall
be in England in the winter or spring." Even some months later, in
December, before Toulon had reverted to the French, he is completely
blind to the importance of the Mediterranean in the great struggle,
and expresses a wish to exchange to the West Indies, "for I think our
Sea War is over i