heavy allowance must be made for the variety of services extending over
the two thousand miles of the Mediterranean, from east to west. Seven
of-the-line had to be kept before Cadiz, though still a neutral port, to
check a French division within. One of the same class was on the Riviera
with Nelson; and other demands, with the necessities of occasional
absences for refit, prevented the admiral from ever assembling before
Toulon, his great strategic care, much more than a round dozen to watch
equal French numbers there. The protection of Corsica, then in British
hands; the convoy of commerce, dispersed throughout the station; the
assurance of communications to the fortress and Straits of Gibraltar, by
which all transit to and from the Mediterranean passes; diplomatic
exigencies with the various littoral states of the inland sea; these
divergent calls, with the coincident necessity of maintaining every ship
in fit condition for action, show the extent of the administrative work
and of the attendant correspondence. The evidence of many eye-witnesses
attests the successful results.

Similar attention, broad yet minute, was demanded for the more onerous
and invidious task of enforcing relaxed discipline and drill. Concerning
these, the most pregnant testimony, alike to the stringency and the
persistence of his measures, may be found in the imbittered expressions
of enemies. Five years later, when the rumor spread that he was to have
the Channel Fleet, the toast was drunk at the table of the man then in
command, "May the discipline of the Mediterranean never be introduced
into the Channel." "May his next glass of wine choke the wretch," is a
speech attributed to a captain's wife, wrathful that her husband was
kept from her side by the admiral's regulations. For Jervis's discipline
began at the top, with the division and ship commanders. One of the
senior admirals under him persisting in a remonstrance, beyond the point
which he considered consistent with discipline, was sent home. "The very
disorderly state of His Majesty's ship under your command," he writes to
a captain, "obliges me to require that neither yourself nor any of your
officers are to go on shore on what is called pleasure." "The
commander-in-chief finds himself under the painful necessity of publicly
reprimanding Captains ---- and ---- for neglect of duty, in not
maintaining the stations assigned to their ships during the last night."
In a letter to a lieutenant