—from The Dynasts, Act V., Scene VII., Part i. Boatmen and burghers with their pipes and mugs are sitting on settles round the fire in the taproom of the Old Rooms Inn at Weymouth. The body of Nelson on board his battered Victory has lately been brought to England to be sepulchred in St. Paul's. And this is the Song the Second Boatman sings.
The "Nothe," line 8, is the promontory that divides for Weymouth, where lived Nelson's Captain Hardy, its harbour or back-sea on the north, and the Portland Roads, its front-sea on the south "Roads," meaning protected seas where ships may ride at anchor. On this tempestuous and fateful night, October 21, 1805, the breakers were sweeping clean across the spit of land called the Narrows. On the further side runs for a round ten miles that enormous wall of pebbles—Chesil Beach, whose stones the tides sort out so precisely—the least in size towards Lyme Regis—that a coast-man can tell even in a thick mist where he has landed on the beach, merely by measuring them with his eye. About ten miles up this water swim in Spring the swans of the Swannery of Abbotsbury with their cygnets, each mother-bird striving to decoy as many strange young ones into her train as she can. So deals a proud and powerful nation with the lesser kingdoms of the earth.
About four years and a half before Trafalgar, on April 2nd, 1801, Nelson and Parker had won the Battle of the Baltic—as Thomas Campbell (who was then twenty-four), in his well-known poem tells:
... Like leviathans afloat
Lay their bulwarks on the brine;
While the sign of battle flew
On the lofty British line:
It was ten of April morn by the chime:
As they drifted on their path,
There was silence deep as death;