vily upon
Nelson, and may help to account, in combination with the tide of
adverse fortune now running strongly, for the depression that weighed
upon him. "My public correspondence, besides the business of sixteen
sail-of-the-line, and all our commerce, is with Petersburg,
Constantinople, the Consul at Smyrna, Egypt, the Turkish and Russian
admirals, Trieste, Vienna, Tuscany, Minorca, Earl St. Vincent, and
Lord Spencer. This over, what time can I have for any private
correspondence?" Yet, admitting freely that there is a limit beyond
which activity may cease to please, what has become of the joyous
spirit, which wrote, not four years before: "This I like, active
service or none!" Occupying one of the most distinguished posts open
to the Navy; practically, and almost formally, independent; at the
very head and centre of the greatest interests,--his zeal, while
preserving all its intensity, has lost all its buoyancy. "My dear
Lord," he tells St. Vincent, alluding at the moment to his stepson
Nisbet, "there is no true happiness in this life, and in my present
state I could quit it with a smile." "My spirits have received such a
shock," he writes some days after, to the wife of his early patron,
Sir Peter Parker, "that I think they cannot recover it. You who
remember me always laughing and gay, would hardly believe the change;
but who can see what I have and be well in health? Kingdoms lost and a
royal family in distress." "Believe me," he confides to his intimate
friend Davison a month later, "my only wish is to sink with honour
into the grave, and when that shall please God, I shall meet death
with a smile. Not that I am insensible to the honours and riches my
King and Country have heaped upon me, so much more than any officer
could deserve; yet I am ready to quit this world of trouble, and envy
none but those of the estate six feet by two." "I am at times ill at
ease, but it is my duty to submit, and you may be sure I will not quit
my post without absolute necessity." "What a state I am in!" he writes
of one of those perplexities inevitable to an officer in his
position. "If I go, I risk Sicily; as I stay, my heart is breaking."
This is not the natural temper of a man to whom difficulties and
perplexities had been, and were yet again to be, a trumpet call that
stirred to animation, a stimulant that steadied the nerves, and sent
the blood coursing with new life through heart and brain. Mingled as
these expressions were wi