based, would be
prejudicial, if, as was most probable, the demand was rejected.
Whatever his reason, Nelson, though indirectly, intimates to Hood that
in this matter he himself agrees, upon the whole, with the general,
and Hood yields the point,--the more so that he learns from Nelson
that the outposts are to be stormed the next night; and sorely was the
captain, in his judicious efforts thus to keep the peace, tried by the
postponement of the promised assault for twenty-four hours. "_Such
things are_," he wrote to Hood, using a favorite expression. "I hope
to God the general, who seems a good officer and an amiable man, is
not led away; but Colonel Moore is his great friend."

The feeling between the land and sea services was emphasized in the
relations existing between Lord Hood and Colonel Moore, who
afterwards, as Sir John Moore, fell gloriously at Corunna. To these
two eminent officers fortune denied the occasion to make full proof of
their greatness to the world; but they stand in the first rank of
those men of promise whose failure has been due, not to their own
shortcomings, but to the lack of opportunity. Sir John Moore has been
the happier, in that the enterprise with which his name is chiefly
connected, and upon which his title to fame securely rests, was
completed, and wrought its full results; fortunate, too, in having
received the vindication of that great action at the hands of the
most eloquent of military historians. His country and his profession
may well mourn a career of such fair opening so soon cut short. But
daring and original in the highest degree as was the march from
Salamanca to Sahagun, it did not exceed, either in originality or in
daring, the purposes nourished by Lord Hood, which he had no
opportunity so to execute as to attract attention. Condemned to
subordinate positions until he had reached the age of seventy, his
genius is known to us only by his letters, and by the frustrated plans
at St. Kitts in 1782, and at Golfe Jouan in 1794, in the former of
which, less fortunate than Moore, he failed to realize his
well-grounded hope of reversing, by a single blow, the issues of a
campaign.

It is to be regretted that two such men could not understand each
other cordially. Hood, we know from his letters, was "of that frame
and texture that I cannot be indifferent,"--"full of anxiety,
impatience, and apprehension,"--when service seemed to him slothfully
done. Moore, we are told by Napier, "