NELSON. 141 



Mahan (n, 52): "The exultant delight unquestionably felt by Nelson in battle 

 did not indicate insensibility to danger, or to its customary effects upon men, 

 but resulted from the pleasurable predominance of other emotions which accepted 

 danger and the startling tokens of its presence as the accompaniments, that only 

 enhanced the majesty of the part he was called upon to play." At the battle of 

 Copenhagen his superior officer signaled him to leave off action. "Leave off 

 action!" he repeated, and then added, with a shrug, "'Now damn me if I do!' 

 He also observed, I believe to Captain Foley, 'You know, Foley, I have only one 

 eye I have a right to be blind sometimes/ and then with an archness peculiar 

 to his character, putting the glass to his blind eye, he exclaimed, 'I really do not 

 see the signal.'" 1 



This capacity for full expression of his impulses and emotions is thus due to 

 the circumstance that at times his inhibitions were feeble. All sorts of emotions 

 at such times were on the surface; repression was weak. Thus he often expressed, 

 naively, his longing for glory and distinction. One of his friends, Lord Radstock, 

 states: "A perpetual thirst of glory was ever raging within him" (Mahan, I, 152). 

 While defending the Channel he writes to St. Vincent: "I feel myself, my dear 

 Lord, as anxious to get a medal or a step in the peerage as if I had never got either. 

 If I succeeded, and burnt the Dutch fleet, probably medals and an earldom." Be- 

 fore going into battle in the Mediterranean days he writes: "Before this time 

 to-morrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey." To this love 

 of glory, vanity is closely allied. Of the period about 1796 Mahan (i, 256) writes: 

 "Already at times his consciousness of distinction among men betrays something 

 of that childlike, delighted vanity, half unwitting, which was afterward forced into 

 exuberant growth and distasteful prominence by the tawdry flatteries of Lady 

 Hamilton and the Court of Naples." 



This abundant emotional output is seen in his love affairs. At the age of 24 

 years in Canada, he fell desperately in love with a fair Canadian and would impru- 

 dently have offered to marry her had not a cool-headed friend successfully inter- 

 vened. A year later in Paris he met a young Englishwoman, had an exaggerated 

 sense of her good qualities, writes "the most accomplished woman my eyes ever 

 beheld," and asks for money to enable him to marry; but the lady seems to have 

 refused him. At the age of 27 years he met a young widow at Nevis, West Indies, 

 and married her. Later, after the battle of the Nile, he became enamored of Lady 

 Hamilton, a woman with a disreputable past, and lived with her publicly, causing his 

 wife to divorce him. "Principle apart, and principle wholly failed him, all else," 

 says Mahan (i, 67) "that most appeals to a man's self-respect and regard for the 

 esteem of others was powerless to exert control. Loyalty to friendship, the sanctity 

 which man is naturally fain to see in the woman he loves, and, in Nelson's own 

 case, a peculiar reluctance to wound another all these were trampled under foot, 

 and ruthlessly piled on the holocaust which he offered to her whom he worshipped." 

 This is the natural reaction where the inhibition the self-control is weak. 



Nelson showed strong religious, emotional output, perhaps not to be wondered 

 at in the son of a minister. This is strongest at times of great excitement. After 

 the battle of the Nile he began his dispatch: "Almighty God has blessed His 

 Majesty's arms." As he is departing for his last sea voyage, ending in Trafalgar, 

 he writes in his diary: "May the great God whom I adore enable me to fulfill the 



1 Statement by Colonel William Stewart, in Mahan, n, 90. 



