responsibility of doing it, and above all an accurate judgment of the
best way to do it,--to act with impunity to himself and with most
chances of success to his cause. Its analogy to a military situation
is striking. There was a wrong condition of things to be righted--a
victory to be won. To achieve this a great risk must be taken, and he
was willing to take it; but in so doing he made such choice of his
ground as to be practically unassailable--to attain his end without
lasting harm to himself. That Nelson would have managed better had he
been ten years older is very probable. Likely enough he betrayed some
of the carelessness of sensibilities which the inexperience of youth
is too apt to show towards age; but, upon a careful review of the
whole, it appears to the writer that his general course of action was
distinctly right, judged by the standards of the time and the
well-settled principles of military obedience, and that he pursued an
extremely difficult line of conduct with singular resolution, with
sound judgment, and, in the main, with an unusual amount of tact,
without which he could scarcely have failed, however well purposing,
to lay himself open to serious consequences. Certainly he achieved
success.

It was in the midst of this legal warfare, and of the preoccupations
arising from it, that Nelson first met the lady who became his wife.
She was by birth a Miss Frances Woolward, her mother being a sister of
the Mr. Herbert already mentioned as President of the Council in
Nevis. She was born in the first half of 1758,[12] and was therefore a
few months older than Nelson. In 1779 she had married Dr. Josiah
Nisbet, of Nevis, and the next year was left a widow with one son, who
bore his father's full name. After her husband's death, being
apparently portionless, she came to live with Herbert, who looked
upon and treated her as his own child, although he also had an only
daughter. When Nelson first arrived at Nevis, in January, 1785,[13]
she was absent, visiting friends in a neighboring island, so that they
did not then meet,--a circumstance somewhat fortunate for us, because
it led to a description of him being sent to her in a letter from a
lady of Herbert's family, not improbably her cousin, Miss Herbert.
Nelson had then become a somewhat conspicuous factor in the contracted
interests of the island society, owing to the stand he had already
publicly assumed with reference to the contraband trade. People were