wholesome-minded, natural-born
statesman. What terrible calamities have come to the State through
putting men into responsible positions they have neither training,
wit, nor wisdom to fill efficiently! Providence has been most
indulgent and forbearing when we have got ourselves into a mess by
wrong-headedness. She generally comes to our aid with an undiscovered
man or a few men with the necessary gifts required for getting us out
of the difficulty in which the Yellow Press gang and their accomplices
may have involved the country. We know something of how the knowledge
of these anomalies in public life chafed the eager spirit of Nelson,
but we can never know the extent of the suffering it caused except
during the Neapolitan and Sicilian days. This lonely soul lived the
life of a recluse for months at a time. The monotony of the weird song
of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers,
the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of
God's works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even on the
most phlegmatic mind, but to the mystically constituted brain of
Nelson, under all the varied thoughts that came into his brain during
the days and nights of watching and searching for those people he
termed "the pests of the human race," it must have been one long
heartache. No wonder that he lets fly at the Admiralty in some of his
most passionate love-messages to the seductive Emma. His dreary life,
without any exciting incident except the carrying away of sails or
spars, and the irritation of not being able to get what he regarded as
life or death requests carried into effect owing to the slothfulness
or incompetent indifference of the Admiralty was continual agony to
him. He writes in one of his dispatches to the Admiralty: "Were I to
die this moment, _want of frigates_ would be found stamped on my
heart. No words of mine," he continues, "can express what I have
suffered and am suffering for want of them."

No person could write such an unconsciously comic lament to a
department supposed to be administered with proficiency unless he were
borne down by a deep sense of its appalling incompetency. It is quite
likely that the recipients of the burning phrases regarded them in the
light of a joke, but they were very real to the wearied soul of the
man who wrote them. I do not find any instances of conscious humour in
any of Nelson's letters or utterances. It is really their lack of