“Nelson,” said she, “however we may lament your absence, offer your services; they will be accepted, and you will gain a quiet heart by it: you will have a glorious victory, and then you may return here and be happy.” He looked at her with tears in his eyes—“Brave Emma! Good Emma!—If there were more Emmas there would be more Nelsons.”
His services were as willingly accepted as they were offered; and Lord Barham, giving him the list of the navy, desired him to choose his own officers.
“Choose yourself, my lord,” was his reply: “the same spirit actuates the whole profession: you cannot choose wrong.”
Lord Barham then desired him to say what ships, and how many, he would wish, in addition to the fleet which he was going to command, and said they should follow him as soon as each was ready.
No appointment was ever more in unison with the feelings and judgment of the whole nation. They, like Lady Hamilton, thought that the destruction of the combined fleets ought properly be Nelson’s work: that he, who had been
“Half around the sea-girt ball,
The hunter of the recreant Gaul,”
ought to reap the spoils of the chase, which he had watched so long, and so perseveringly pursued.
Unremitting exertions were made to equip the ships which he had chosen, and especially to refit the Victory, which was once more to bear his flag.
Before he left London he called at his upholsterer’s, where the coffin, which Captain Hallowell had given him, was deposited; and desired that its history might be engraven upon the lid, saying, it was highly probable that he might want it on his return. He seemed, indeed, to have been impressed with an expectation that he should fall in the battle. In a letter to his brother, written immediately after his return, he had said: “We must not talk of Sir Robert Calder’s battle—I might not have done so much with my small force. If I had fallen in with them, you might probably have been a lord before I wished; for I know they meant to make a dead set at the Victory.”
Nelson had once regarded the prospect of death with gloomy satisfaction: it was when he anticipated the upbraidings of his wife, and the displeasure of his venerable father. The state of his feelings now was expressed, in his private journal, in these words: