“I do not conceive that Commodore Fischer had the least idea of claiming as a victory what to every intent and purpose was a defeat:  he has only thought, that this defeat was not an inglorious one; and, that our officers and men displayed much bravery and firmness, against force so superior in every respect.  Your lordship’s report, and your letter to me, proves it.  I confess, that your lordship took all the vessels opposed to you; except five, carrying together eighty-six guns.  I am of opinion, with your lordship, that three ships of seventy-four guns each would have been a hard match for the Three Crowns Battery; but, they certainly would have been forced to go away.

“As to your lordship’s motive for sending a flag of truce to our government, it can never be misconstrued; and your subsequent conduct has sufficiently shewn, that humanity is always the companion of true valour.  You have done more; you have shewn yourself a friend of the re-establishment of peace, and good harmony, between this country and Great Britain.  It is, therefore, with the sincerest esteem, I shall always feel myself attached to your lordship; and it is with the greatest respect I have the honour to subscribe myself, my lord, your lordship’s most obedient and most humble servant,

     “H.  Lindholm.”

On these respective letters, the judicious part of mankind will judge for themselves.  We need not have blushed for a Lindholm, but we have reason to glory in our Nelson.  Olfert Fischer, notwithstanding the arguments of his able apologist, must always be considered as having been superabundantly solicitous for the safety of his own person:  in leaving two different ships, by his own confession, while the respective crews continued fighting; and finally retiring, to continue his command, under cover of a powerful battery on shore.  His roundly asserting, that we had two ships for one, and that he was told two English ships had struck; his ungenerous and distorted application of Lord Nelson’s noble acknowledgment of the general bravery of the Danes; and the low source of solace that he finds in disingenuously limiting the advantage gained by the victory to the possession of a few wretched wrecks, without at all appreciating the grand political consequences which it so fully accomplished; exhibit, in the whole, a disposition meanly selfish, conspicuously sordid, and deplorably deficient in all the most lofty qualities of mind.  What a contrast to our immortal Nelson! whose single sentence, in his letter of rebuke for this man—­“God forbid that I should destroy an unresisting Dane! When they became my prisoners, I became their protector!”—­deserves to be charactered with letters of diamonds on the shrine destined to cover the hero’s hallowed remains.

Lord Nelson did not think it necessary to differ with his friend Lindholm, an undoubted man of honour, about punctilious particulars.  To his own mind, however, or that of an enemy, he would not abate a particle of what he had asserted.  The following statement is copied from a private memorandum of his lordship’s, in which he acutely turns the scale of superior force against the Danes.