often broken by the presence of officers from
the other vessels, who, whether cruising in company with the fleet, or
arriving with tidings from different ports, were daily partakers of
the admiral's hospitable table, could not but depress him; and there
was with him the constant sense of loss, by absence from those he held
most dear. "I have not a thought except on you and the French fleet,"
he tells Lady Hamilton; "all my thoughts, plans, and toils tend to
those two objects. Don't laugh at my putting you and the French fleet
together, but you cannot be separated."

Yet even towards her his mind is fixed as of old, that she must take a
place second to duty. She had, it appears, insisted upon her wish to
come out to the station to be near him. Malta and Italy were both, he
said, out of the question. His place was off Toulon, as long as the
French fleet was there; therefore he could not go into harbor; nay, "I
might absolutely miss you, by leaving the Mediterranean without
warning. The other day we had a report the French were out, and seen
steering to the westward. We were as far as Minorca when the alarm
proved false." As for coming on board the "Victory" to live, which
she seems to have suggested, "Imagine what a cruize off Toulon is;
even in summer time we have a hard gale every week, and two days'
heavy swell. It would kill you; and myself to see you. Much less
possible to have Charlotte, Horatia, &c., on board ship! And I, that
have given orders to carry no women to sea in the Victory, to be the
first to break them! I know, my own dear Emma, if she will let her
reason have fair play, will say I am right; but she is like Horatia,
very angry if she cannot have her own way." "Horatia is like her
mother; will have her own way, or kick up a devil of a dust,"--an
observation both Greville and Hamilton had had to make. "Your Nelson,"
he concludes, "is called upon, in the most honourable manner, to
defend his country. Absence to us is equally painful: but, if I had
either stayed at home, or neglected my duty abroad, would not my Emma
have blushed for me? She could never have heard my praises, and how
the country looks up." "The call of our country," he says again,
"makes it indispensable for both our honours--the country looks up to
the services of the poorest individual, much more to me, and are you
not a sharer of my glory?"

Of his daily life on board, and intercourse with others, we have
intimations, fragmentary yet