AGE, 43-44.

During the brief interval between his return from the Baltic, July
I,1801, and his taking command of the Squadron on a Particular
Service, on the 27th of the same month, Nelson had made his home in
England with the Hamiltons, to whose house in Piccadilly he went
immediately upon his arrival in London. Whatever doubt may have
remained in his wife's mind, as to the finality of their parting in
the previous January, or whatever trace of hesitation may then have
existed in his own, had been definitively removed by letters during
his absence. To her he wrote on the 4th of March, immediately before
the expedition sailed from Yarmouth: "Josiah[39] is to have another
ship and to go abroad, if the Thalia cannot soon be got ready. I have
done _all_ for him, and he may again, as he has often done before,
wish me to break my neck, and be abetted in it by his friends, who are
likewise my enemies; but I have done my duty as an honest, generous
man, and I neither want or wish for anybody to care what becomes of
me, whether I return, or am left in the Baltic. Living, I have done
all in my power for you, and if dead, you will find I have done the
same; therefore my only wish is, to be left to myself: and wishing you
every happiness, believe that I am, your affectionate Nelson and
Bronte." Upon this letter Lady Nelson endorsed: "This is My Lord
Nelson's Letter of dismissal, which so astonished me that I
immediately sent it to Mr. Maurice Nelson,[40] who was sincerely
attached to me, for his advice. He desired me not to take the least
notice of it, as his brother seemed to have forgot himself."

A separation preceded and caused by such circumstances as this was,
could not fail to be attended with bitterness on both sides; yet one
could have wished to see in a letter which is believed, and probably
was intended, to be the last ever addressed by him to her, some
recollection, not only of what he himself had done for his stepson,
but that once, to use his own expression, "the boy" had "saved his
life;" and that, after all, if he was under obligations to Nelson, he
would have been more than youth, had no intemperance of expression
mingled with the resentment he felt for the slights offered his mother
in the face of the world. With Nelson's natural temperament and
previous habits of thought, however, it was imperative, for his peace
of mind, to justify his course of action to himself; and this he could
do only by dwelling upon