by her lapse into
feminine weakness when the strain was over. To use her own words, in a
letter to her old lover, Greville, "My dear, adorable queen and I
_weep together_, and now that is our onely comfort." "Our dear Lady
Hamilton," Nelson wrote again a few days later, "whom to see is to
admire, but, to know, are to be added honour and respect; her head and
heart surpass her beauty, which cannot be equalled by anything I have
seen." Upon himself the brief emergency and its sharp call to action
had had the usual reviving effect. "Thank God," he wrote to Spencer,
"my health is better, my mind never firmer, and my heart in the right
trim to comfort, relieve, and protect those who it is my duty to
afford assistance to."

In Palermo Nelson again lived in the minister's house, bearing a
large, if not a disproportionate, share of the expenses. When they
returned to England in 1800, Hamilton was L2,000 in his debt. The
intimacy and the manner of life, in the midst of the Neapolitan court,
whose corruptness of manners both Nelson and Troubridge openly
condemned, was already causing scandal, rumors of which were not long
in reaching home. "I am quite concerned," wrote Captain Ball to
Saumarez, when Nelson was about to quit the station, "at the many
severe paragraphs which have been put in the newspapers respecting him
and Lady Hamilton. I am convinced that there has not been anything
improper between them--his Lordship could not fail being delighted
with her accomplishments and manners, which are very fascinating."
Lady Nelson, uneasy as a wife could not fail to be at reports
affecting her husband's honor, and threatening her own happiness,
quickly formed, and for a time entertained, the thought of joining him
on the station; but, if she broached the idea to Nelson, he certainly
discouraged it. Writing to her on the 10th of April, 1799, he said:
"You would by February have seen how unpleasant it would have been had
you followed _any_ advice, which carried you from England to a
wandering sailor. I could, if you had come, _only_ have struck my
flag, and carried you back again, for it would have been impossible to
have set up an establishment at either Naples or Palermo."[75]

The scandal increased apace after his headquarters were fixed at
Palermo. Lady Minto, writing from Vienna to her sister, in July, 1800,
says: "Mr. Rushout and Colonel Rooke,[76] whom I knew in Italy, are
here. Mr. Rushout is at last going home. He escaped f