e Smee is longer than any pleasure I find in the
sport will compensate for." The fact is that Nelson cared for none of
these things, and the only deduction of real interest from his letters
at this time is the absolute failure of his home life and affections
to content his aspirations,--the emptiness both of mind and heart,
which caused his passionate eagerness for external employment to fill
the void. Earnestness appears only when he is brooding over the slight
with which he was treated, and the resultant thwarting of his career.
For both mind and heart the future held in store for him the most
engrossing emotions, but it did not therefore bring him happiness.

Of his frames of mind during this period of neglect and disfavor, his
biographers give a very strongly colored picture, for which, it is to
be presumed, they drew upon contemporary witnesses that were to them
still accessible. "With a mortified and dejected spirit, he looked
forward to a continuance of inactivity and neglect.... During this
interval of disappointment and mortification, his latent ambition
would at times burst forth, and despise all restraint. At others, a
sudden melancholy seemed to overshadow his noble faculties, and to
affect his temper; at those moments the remonstrances of his wife and
venerable father alone could calm the tempest of his passions." That
Nelson keenly felt the cold indifference he now underwent, is
thoroughly in keeping with the sensitiveness to censure, expressed or
implied, which his correspondence frequently betrays, while his frail
organization and uncertain health would naturally entail periods of
depression or nervous exasperation; but the general tenor of his
letters, few as they at this time were, shows rather dignified
acceptance of a treatment he had not merited, and a steady resolve not
to waver in his readiness to serve his country, nor to cease asking an
opportunity to do so. Many years later, at a time of still more
sickening suspense, he wrote: "I am in truth half dead, but what man
can do shall be done,--I am not made to despair;" and now, according
to a not improbable story, he closed an application for employment
with the words, "If your Lordships should be pleased to appoint me to
a cockle boat, I shall feel grateful." Hood, whose pupil he in a sense
was, and who shared his genius, said of himself, when under a
condition of enforced inactivity: "This proves very strongly the
different frames of men's minds;