o observe character transpiring in conversation. Bourrienne has
told us that Bonaparte took pleasure in provoking similar debates.
Scott himself, a man essentially unpractical, afforded Nelson
amusement as well as interest, and was the object of a good deal of
innocent chaffing. He would, in those after-dinner gatherings which
Gillespie mentions, lead the doctor into arguments on literature,
politics, Spanish and even naval affairs, and would occasionally
provoke from him a lecture on navigation itself, to the great
entertainment of Murray, Hardy, and the other officers present.[70]
"Ah, my dear Doctor!" he would say chaffingly, "give me knowledge
practically acquired--experience! experience! experience! and
practical men!"

Nelson, however, was too big and too broad a man not to know that,
while by doing the same thing, or bearing the same thing, many
times,--by experience, that is,--one acquires a facility not otherwise
communicable, in a novel situation a man is abler to act, the more he
has availed himself of the knowledge and the suggestions of others.
Absorbed with the duties of his station, it was of the first
importance that he should possess every information, and ponder every
idea, small and great, bearing upon its conditions, as well as upon
the general political state of Europe in that period of ominous
waiting, wherein great events were evidently coming to birth. Day
after day, Dr. Scott's biographer tells us, was passed by the two
together, sitting in two black leathern arm-chairs with roomy pockets,
stuffed with papers, written and printed, journals and pamphlets,
gathered from every source--from prizes, from passing neutral vessels,
from cruisers returning from neutral or friendly ports, or picked up
by the doctor himself in the not infrequent trips on which he was
sent, ostensibly for pleasure, but with a keen eye also to the
collection of intelligence. Marked externally by the abstraction of a
book-worm, entirely unpractical and heedless in the common affairs of
life, and subject to an occasional flightiness of action, the result
in part of an injury to his head while in the service, Scott gave
those who saw him going about an impression of guilelessness, which
covered him from the suspicion of having a mission. He had, says his
biographer, "in union with a capacity for very difficult services, a
simplicity that often put him at disadvantage in worldly matters, and
it became a common joke with the Adm