er they parted, "and it is capable of aspiring to any
line which would be celebrated, and it would be indifferent, when on
that key, whether she was Lucretia or Sappho, or Scaevola or Regulus;
anything grand, masculine or feminine, she could take up."

Unhappily, Nelson was not able to stand the heady dose of flattery
administered by a woman of such conspicuous beauty and consummate art;
nor was his taste discriminating enough to experience any wholesome
revolt against the rankness of the draught she offered him. The quick
appreciation of the born actress, which enabled her when on the stage
to clothe herself with a grace and refinement that dropped away when
she left it, conspired with his simplicity of confidence in others,
and his strong tendency to idealize, to invest her with a character
very different from the true. Not that the Lady Hamilton of reality
was utterly different from the Lady Hamilton of his imagination. That
she ever loved him is doubtful; but there were in her spirit impulses
capable of sympathetic response to his own in his bravest acts, though
not in his noblest motives. It is inconceivable that duty ever
appealed, to her as it did to him, nor could a woman of innate
nobility of character have dragged a man of Nelson's masculine renown
about England and the Continent, till he was the mock of all
beholders; but on the other hand it never could have occurred to the
energetic, courageous, brilliant Lady Hamilton, after the lofty deeds
and stirring dramatic scenes of St. Vincent, to beg him, as Lady
Nelson did, "to leave boarding to captains." Sympathy, not good taste,
would have withheld her. In Lady Nelson's letters there is evidence
enough of a somewhat colorless womanly affection, but not a thrill of
response to the greatness of her husband's daring, even when
surrounded herself by the acclamations it called forth.

What Nelson had never yet found in woman Lady Hamilton gave
him,--admiration and appreciation, undisguised and unmeasured, yet
bestowed by one who had the power, by the admission of even unfriendly
critics, of giving a reality and grace to the part she was performing.
He was soon at her feet. The playful gallantry with which Ball,
Elliot, and even old St. Vincent[74] himself, paid court to a handsome
woman, greedy of homage, became in Nelson a serious matter. Romantic
in temperament, he was all day in flattering contact with her. Worn
out and ill from that "fever of anxiety," to use h