mptory summons to diplomatic apology in one hand, and a threat of
bombardment in the other. For both these affairs Nelson considered he
had a personal score to settle. "I rather believe my antagonist at
Toulon begins to be angry with me: at least, I am trying to make him
so; and then, he may come out, and beat me, as he says he did off
Boulogne. He is the Admiral that went to Naples in December, 1792,
who landed the grenadier. I owe him something for that."

The French having eight sail-of-the-line certainly ready for sea, and
two or three more nearly so--how nearly Nelson was not sure--he now
endeavored to lure them out. "I have taken a method of making Mr. La
Touche Treville angry. I have left Sir Richard Bickerton, with part of
the fleet, twenty leagues from hence, and, with five of the line, am
preventing his cutting capers, which he has done for some time past,
off Cape Sicie." "He seems inclined to try his hand with us," he
writes a week later, "and by my keeping so great an inferiority close
to him, perhaps he may some day be tempted." Nelson had near Toulon at
the time nine ships-of-the-line. Had he succeeded in bringing Latouche
Treville to attack his five, he would have hoped, even with such odds,
for a decisive victory; but, failing that, he was assured that the
Toulon fleet would be out of the game for that summer. It was
important to bring matters to an issue, for, as he wrote Elliot, his
force was diminishing daily through the deterioration of ships never
from the first fit for their work. Measured by the standard of the
ships in the Channel, "I have but four sail fit to keep the sea. I
absolutely keep them out by management." Except the four, all needed
docking, and there was not a dock open to the British west of
Constantinople.

But, while thus keenly anxious to force an action, he was wary to
obtain tactical conditions that should insure a success, adequate both
to the risk he ran, and to the object at which he aimed. "I think
their fleet will be ordered out to fight close to Toulon, that they
may get their crippled ships in again, and that we must then quit the
coast to repair our damages, and thus leave the coast clear; but my
mind is fixed not to fight them, unless with a westerly wind, outside
the Hieres, and with an easterly wind, to the westward of Sicie."
Crippled there, to leeward of their port, the other British division
coming up fresh, as a reserve, from the southward, where it lay
conceal