exaltation of the hero and the patriot with the degradation of the
man, lie the tragedy and the misery of Nelson's story. And this, too,
was incurred on behalf of a woman whose reputation and conduct were
such that no shred of dignity could attach to an infatuation as doting
as it was blamable. The pitiful inadequacy of the temptation to the
ruin it caused invests with a kind of prophecy the words he had
written to his betrothed in the heyday of courtship: "These I trust
will ever be my sentiments; if they are not, I do verily believe it
will be my _folly_ that occasions it."

The inward struggle, though severe, was short and decisive. Once
determined on his course, he choked down scruples and hesitations,
and cast them from him with the same single-minded resolution that
distinguished his public acts. "Fixed as fate," were the remorseless
words with which he characterized his firm purpose to trample
conscience under foot, and to reject his wife in favor of his
mistress. But although ease may be obtained by silencing
self-reproach, safety scarcely can. One cannot get the salt out of his
life, and not be the worse for it. Much that made Nelson so lovable
remained to the end; but into his heart, as betrayed by his
correspondence, and into his life, from the occasional glimpses
afforded by letters or journals of associates, there thenceforth
entered much that is unlovely, and which to no appreciable extent was
seen before. The simple _bonhomie_, the absence of conventional
reticence, the superficial lack of polish, noted by his early
biographers, and which he had had no opportunity to acquire, the
childlike vanity that transpires so innocently in his confidential
home letters, and was only the weak side of his noble longing for
heroic action, degenerated rapidly into loss of dignity of life, into
an unseemly susceptibility to extravagant adulation, as he succumbed
to surroundings, the corruptness of which none at first realized more
clearly, and where one woman was the sole detaining fascination. And
withal, as the poison worked, discontent with self bred discontent
with others, and with his own conditions. Petulance and querulousness
too often supplanted the mental elasticity, which had counted for
naught the roughnesses on the road to fame. The mind not worthily
occupied, and therefore ill at ease, became embittered, prone to
censure and to resent, suspicious at times and harsh in judgment,
gradually tending towards a