no more than due to Nelson’s distinguished merit and services, and he had indeed offered him each ship of that rate whose command fell vacant in the Mediterranean; but the strong sense of attachment to those who had shared his toils and dangers, of reluctance that they should see him willing to leave them, after their hard work together,—­that combination of sympathy and tact which made so much of Nelson’s success as a leader of men,—­continued to prevent his accepting promotion that would sever his ties to them.

The exigencies of the war in the Mediterranean forbade the departure, even of a sixty-four with a disabled crew.  A full month later her sick-list was still seventy-seven, out of a total of less than four hundred.  “Though certainly unfit for a long cruise,” Nelson said, “we are here making a show,”—­a military requirement not to be neglected or despised.  He accepted the disappointment, as he did all service rubs at this period, with perfect temper and in the best spirit.  “We must not repine,” he wrote to his wife on the 12th of October, the day after Hood sailed for England.  “Lord Hood is very well inclined towards me, but the service must ever supersede all private consideration.  I hope you will spend the winter cheerfully.  Do not repine at my absence; before spring I hope we shall have peace, when we must look out for some little cottage.”  She fretted, however, as some women will; and he, to comfort her, wrote more sanguinely about himself than the facts warranted.  “Why you should be uneasy about me, so as to make yourself ill, I know not.  I feel a confident protection in whatever service I may be employed upon; and as to my health, I don’t know that I was ever so truly well.  I fancy myself grown quite stout.”  To his old captain, Locker, he admitted that he could not get the better of the fever.

Corsica being now wholly in the power of its inhabitants, allied with and supported by Great Britain, his attention and interest were engrossed by the French fleet centring upon Toulon, the dominant factor of concern to the British in the Mediterranean, where Vice-Admiral Hotham had succeeded Hood as commander-in-chief.  Nelson realizes more and more the mistake that was made, when a fraction of it was allowed to escape battle in the previous June.  The various reasons by which he had at first excused the neglect to bring it to action no longer weigh with him.  He does not directly blame, but he speaks of the omission as an “opportunity lost,”—­a phrase than which there are few more ominous, in characterizing the closely balanced, yet weighty, decisions, upon which the issues of war depend.  Nothing, he thinks, can prevent the junction of the two fragments,—­then in Golfe Jouan and Toulon,—­one of which, with more resolution and promptitude on Hotham’s part, might have been struck singly at sea a few months before; and if they join, there must follow a fleet action, between forces too nearly equal to insure to Great Britain the decisive results that were needed.