William appeared broken,
distressed, and harassed.

On the 11th the travellers started for Florence, passing within two
miles of the French advanced posts. At Ancona they embarked on board
some Russian frigates, and in them reached Trieste safely on the 2d of
August. Nelson was received with acclamations in all the towns of the
Pope's states. A party in which were not only the queen of a reigning
sovereign, but an English minister and his wife, was sure of receiving
attention wherever it passed or stopped; but in the present case it
was the naval officer who carried off the lion's share of homage, so
widely had his fame spread throughout the Continent. At Trieste, says
Miss Knight, "he is followed by thousands when he goes out, and for
the illumination which is to take place this evening, there are many
_Viva Nelsons_ prepared."

The same enthusiasm was shown at Vienna, where they arrived on the
21st or 22d of August. "You can have no notion of the anxiety and
curiosity to see him," wrote Lady Minto.[9] "The door of his house is
always crowded with people, and even the street when his carriage is
at the door; and when he went to the play he was applauded, a thing
which rarely happens here." "Whenever he appeared in public," records
Miss Knight, "a crowd was collected, and his portrait was hung up as a
sign over many shops--even the milliners giving his name to particular
dresses, but it did not appear to me that the English nation was at
all popular." At a dinner at Prince Esterhazy's, where he spent some
days, his health was drunk with a flourish of trumpets and firing of
cannon. "I don't think him altered in the least," continued Lady
Minto, who remembered him from the old days in Corsica. "He has the
same shock head and the same honest simple manners; but he is devoted
to _Emma_, he thinks her quite an _angel_, and talks of her as such to
her face and behind her back, and she leads him about like a keeper
with a bear. She must sit by him at dinner to cut his meat, and he
carries her pocket-handkerchief. He is a gig from ribands, orders and
stars, but he is just the same with us as ever he was;" and she
mentions his outspoken gratitude to Minto for the substantial service
he had done him, and the guidance he had imparted to his political
thought,--an acknowledgment he frequently renewed up to the last days
of his life.

Lady Minto's nephew, Lord Fitzharris, the son of the Earl of
Malmesbury, was then in Vienna, a