us settle the matter. You know I hate being
kept in suspense." The nervous excitability--irritability--that often
overlay the usually cordial kindliness and gracious bearing of the
man, was an easy prey to such harassment. It breaks out at times in
his letters, but was only occasionally visible to those around him. By
the first of December he already foresees that he cannot last long.
"Next Christmas, please God, I shall be at Merton; for, by that time,
with all the anxiety attendant on such a command as this, I shall be
done up. The mind and body both wear out."

As autumn drew towards winter, the bitter cold went through his feeble
frame, and in the wild weather he was "always tossed about, and always
sea-sick." "We have had a most terrible winter," he writes, even
before the New Year. "It has almost knocked me up. I have been very
ill, and am now far from recovered; but I hope to hold out till the
battle is over, when I must recruit." "My heart, my Lord, is warm," he
tells Lord Hobart, the Secretary of State for War, "my head is firm,
but my body is unequal to my wishes. I am visibly shook; but as long
as I can hold out, I shall never abandon my truly honourable post." He
feared also blindness. "My eyesight fails me most dreadfully," he
writes to his old friend Davison. "I firmly believe that, in a very
few years, I shall be stone-blind. It is this only, of all my
maladies, that makes me unhappy; but God's will be done." The first
winter was unusually severe, and during it was added, to his official
cares and personal suffering, an extreme anxiety about Lady Hamilton,
for he was expecting the birth of a second child in January. This
child, a girl, lived but a short time; he never saw her. The effect of
these various causes upon his health was so great, that the
physicians, as early as January, 1804, were advising his return. "The
medical gentlemen are wanting to survey me, and to send me to Bristol
for the re-establishment of my health," he tells Minto; but he adds,
"do not mention it (it is my concern) I beg of you." Reports were then
unusually persistent that the enemy was about to put to sea. "_I_ must
not be sick until after the French fleet is taken."

To the last moment the destination of the French and the purposes of
Bonaparte remained unknown to him, a fruitful source of guessing and
worry. "It is at best but a guess," he wrote to Ball, after a year's
pondering, "and the world attaches wisdom to him that gu