the uttermost the honest heart-felt sense
of duty, is the first. If the name Wellington is not so much of a trumpet to the
blood as the simpler name Nelson, the reason for this may perhaps be inferred
from the above. Alfred in his funeral ode on the victor of Waterloo ventures not
to call him the greatest soldier of all time, though in the same ode he invokes
Nelson as »the greatest sailor since the world began.«
    At Trafalgar Nelson on the brink of opening the fight sat down and wrote his
last brief will and testament. If under the presentiment of the most magnificent
of all victories, to be crowned by his own glorious death, a sort of priestly
motive led him to dress his person in the jewelled vouchers of his own shining
deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for the altar and the sacrifice were
indeed vainglory, then affectation and fustian is each truly heroic line in the
great epics and dramas, since in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those
exaltations of sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being given,
vitalises into acts.
 

                                       V

The outbreak at the Nore was put down. But not every grievance was redressed. If
the contractors, for example, were no longer permitted to ply some practices
peculiar to their tribe everywhere, such as providing shoddy cloth, rations not
sound, or false in the measure; not the less impressment, for one thing, went
on. By custom sanctioned for centuries, and judicially maintained by a Lord
Chancellor as late as Mansfield, that mode of manning the fleet, a mode now
fallen into a sort of abeyance but never formally renounced, it was not
practicable to give up in those years. Its abrogation would have crippled the
indispensable fleet, one wholly under canvas, no steam-power, its innumerable
sails and thousands of cannon, everything in short, worked by muscle alone; a
fleet the more insatiate in demand for men, because then multiplying its ships
of all grades against contingencies present and to come of the convulsed
Continent.
    Discontent foreran the Two Mutinies, and more or less it lurkingly survived
them. Hence it was not unreasonable to apprehend some return of trouble sporadic
or general. One instance of such apprehensions: In the same year with this
story, Nelson, then Vice-Admiral Sir Horatio, being with the fleet on the
Spanish coast, was directed by the admiral in command to shift his pennant from
the Captain to the Theseus; and for this reason: that the latter ship having
newly arrived in the station from home where it had taken part in the Great
Mutiny,