he public by the
industry of Sir Harris Nicolas, will hereafter be the manual of the
sailor, as the sister service has found a guide in the _Despatches of
the Duke of Wellington_. All that was to be expected from the
well-known talent of the editor, united to an enthusiasm for his hero,
which has carried him triumphantly through the extraordinary labour of
investigating and ascertaining every fact in the slightest degree
bearing upon his subject, is to be found in this volume, in which,
from the beginning to the end, by a continued series of letters,
Nelson is made his own historian; and we sincerely believe, divesting
ourselves as far as possible of all prejudice and partiality, that no
character ever came purer from the ordeal of unreserved
communication--where not a thought is concealed or an expression
studied--than the true friend, the good son, the affectionate brother,
Horatio Nelson. The correspondence in this volume only extends from
1777 to 1794, and no blot has yet occurred to mar the brightness of a
character where there is so much to like, that the reader finds it
difficult to dwell on the heroic parts of it which he is only called
upon to admire. When the volume ends, he is only thirty-six years old,
and is captain of the Agamemnon; but his path is clearly traced
out--his name is in men's mouths and his character established. And,
looking over the whole correspondence, nothing, perhaps, is so
striking as the early development of his peculiar qualities, and the
firm unswerving line he struck into from the beginning and continued
in to the last. A self-reliance, amounting in weaker and less
equally-balanced natures to doggedness and conceit--a clear perception
of the circumstances of a case almost resembling intuition--a
patriotism verging on the romantic, and a sense of duty never for a
moment yielding to the "whips and scorns that patient merit of the
unworthy takes," are displayed in every incident of his life, from the
time that he left the quiet parsonage-house at Burnham Thorpe, till he
finished his glorious career.

At twelve years of age, he joined his uncle in the Raisonable
sixty-four, and served in her as midshipman for five months; and few
people would have been able to discover the future hero in the feeble
boy he must have been at that time. Still less, perhaps, would they
have expected the future Bronte, a few months later, in the person of
a little fellow, no longer a midshipman in the Royal