ing my
mind to believe. To miss them, God forbid.... If I should miss these
fellows, my heart will break: I am actually only now recovering the
shock of missing them in 1798. God knows I only serve to fight those
scoundrels; and if I cannot do that, I should be better on shore."
When the weather cleared, and a reconnoissance showed the news was
false, his intense relief found expression in the words: "I believe
this is the only time in my life, that I was glad to hear the French
were in port." "The French ships," he says at another time, "have
either altered their anchorage, or some of them have got to sea in the
late gales: the idea has given me half a fever. If that admiral were
to cheat me out of my hopes of meeting him, it would kill me much
easier than one of his balls. Since we sat down to dinner Captain
Moubray has made the signal, but I am very far from being easy."

On the 12th of May, 1804, there was a change of administration in
England. Earl St. Vincent left the Admiralty, as First Lord, and was
succeeded by Lord Melville. A few days before this Nelson, by a
general promotion, had become Vice-Admiral of the White, the rank in
which he died eighteen months later.

The return of summer had improved his health from the low condition
into which it had fallen during the winter, but he did not flatter
himself as to the future. The combination of colorless monotony with
constant racking anxiety slackened the springs of moral energy, which,
and which alone, responding joyously to a call to action, afforded the
stimulus capable of triumphing over his bodily weakness, and causing
it for the moment to disappear. "This is an odd war," he said, "not a
battle!" Tying himself to the ship, in profound sympathy with the
crews, he never went ashore from the time he left Malta in June, 1803,
until he reached Gibraltar in July, 1805; nor was he ever outside of
the "Victory" from July 30, 1803, the day he went on board her from
the "Amphion." "Always shut up in the Victory's cabin," as he himself
wrote, "cannot be very good for the constitution. I think you will
find me grown thin, but never mind." Other officers, especially of the
frigates, got their occasional runs ashore; but his slight figure was
continually in view, walking the front of the poop, to the unconscious
contentment of the men, thus reminded ever that their admiral shared
their deprivations. This profound seclusion to the narrow circle of
the flagship, although