danger;” and his desire was accomplished.  His intrepidity was complete.  No form of death had power to daunt him.  Once and again, when bound on some deadly enterprise of war, he calmly counts the chances whether or not he can compel his feeble body to bear him on till the work is done.  A frame so delicately strung could not have been insensible to danger; but forgetfulness of self, and the absorption of every faculty in the object before him, shut out the sense of fear.  He seems always to have been at his best in the thick of battle; most complete in his mastery over himself and over others.

But it is in the intimacies of domestic life that one sees him most closely, and especially in his letters to his mother, from whom he inherited his frail constitution, without the beauty that distinguished her.  “The greatest happiness that I wish for here is to see you happy.”  “If you stay much at home I will come and shut myself up with you for three weeks or a month, and play at piquet from morning till night; and you shall laugh at my short red hair as much as you please.”  The playing at piquet was a sacrifice to filial attachment; for the mother loved cards, and the son did not.  “Don’t trouble yourself about my room or my bedclothes; too much care and delicacy at this time would enervate me and complete the destruction of a tottering constitution.  Such as it is, it must serve me now, and I’ll make the best of it while it holds.”  At the beginning of the war his father tried to dissuade him from offering his services on board the fleet; and he replies in a letter to Mrs. Wolfe:  “It is no time to think of what is convenient or agreeable; that service is certainly the best in which we are the most useful.  For my part, I am determined never to give myself a moment’s concern about the nature of the duty which His Majesty is pleased to order us upon.  It will be a sufficient comfort to you two, as far as my person is concerned,—­at least it will be a reasonable consolation,—­to reflect that the Power which has hitherto preserved me may, if it be his pleasure, continue to do so; if not, that it is but a few days or a few years more or less, and that those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country die honorably.”  Then he proceeds to give particular directions about his numerous dogs, for the welfare of which in his absence he provides with anxious solicitude, especially for “my friend Caesar, who has great merit and much good-humor.”

After the unfortunate expedition against Rochefort, when the board of general officers appointed to inquire into the affair were passing the highest encomiums upon his conduct, his parents were at Bath, and he took possession of their house at Blackheath, whence he wrote to his mother:  “I lie in your chamber, dress in the General’s little parlor, and dine where you did.  The most perceptible difference and change of affairs (exclusive of the bad table I keep) is the number of dogs in the yard; but by coaxing Ball [his father’s dog] and rubbing his back with my stick, I have reconciled him with the new ones, and put them in some measure under his protection.”