be obliged to remain
inactive at Palermo, while active service was going on in other parts
of the station. I should still much prefer your remaining to complete
the reduction of Malta, which I flatter myself cannot be very far
distant, and I still look with anxious expectation to the Guillaume
Tell striking to your flag. But if, unfortunately, these agreeable
events are to be prevented, by your having too much exhausted yourself
in the service to be equal to follow them up, I am quite clear, and I
believe I am joined in opinion by all your friends here, that you will
be more likely to recover your health and strength in England than in
an inactive situation at a Foreign Court, however pleasing the respect
and gratitude shown to you for your services may be, and no
testimonies of respect and gratitude from that Court to you can be, I
am convinced, too great for the very essential services you have
rendered it. I trust that you will take in good part what I have
taken the liberty to write to you as a friend."

Both these letters reached Nelson in June, at Leghorn, on his way
home. The underlying censure did not escape him,--"your two letters
gave me much pain," he replied,--but he showed no traces of
self-condemnation, or of regret for the past. Lord Minto, who was now
ambassador at Vienna, wrote thence in March of this year, before the
question of going home was decided: "I have letters from Nelson and
Lady Hamilton. It does not seem clear whether he will go home. I hope
he will not for his own sake, and he will at least, I hope, take Malta
first. He does not seem at all conscious of the sort of discredit he
has fallen into, or the cause of it, for he still writes, not wisely,
about Lady H. and all that. But it is hard to condemn and use ill a
hero, as he is in his own element, for being foolish about a woman who
has art enough to make fools of many wiser than an admiral." Many
years later, immediately after the parting which he did not then know
was the last, Minto said of him, "He is in many points a really great
man, in others a baby." Nelson himself, conscious of the diligence
which he had used in the administration of his wide command and its
varied interests, put out of court all other considerations of
propriety. "I trust you and all my friends will believe," he told
Spencer, "that mine cannot be an inactive life, although it may not
carry all the outward parade of _much ado about nothing_."

Had the Hamiltons