from an otherwise busy life.

Even if I had thought it desirable, it was hardly possible to write
about Nelson without also dealing with Britain's great adversary and
Nelson's distracted opinion of him.

It would be futile to attempt to draw a comparison between the two
men. The one was a colossal human genius, and the other, extraordinary
in the art of his profession, was entirely without the faculty of
understanding or appreciating the distinguished man he flippantly
raged at from his quarterdeck.

But be that as it may, Nelson's terrific aversion to and explosions
against the French and Napoleon, in whose history I had been absorbed
for many years, seem to me to be the deliberate outpouring of a mind
governed by feeling rather than by knowledge as to the real cause of
the wars and of how we came to be involved and continue in them. Nor
does he ever show that he had any clear conception of the history of
Napoleon's advent as the Ruler of the People with whom we were at war.

I have given this book the title of "Drake, Nelson and Napoleon"
because it seemed to me necessary to bring in Drake, the prototype,
and Napoleon, the antagonist of Nelson.

Drake's influence bore fruit in what is known as the Fleet Tradition,
which culminated in the "Nelson touch." No excuse is needed,
therefore, for writing a chapter which shows how little the seaman's
character has changed in essentials since that time. To-day, our
sailors have the same simple direct force which characterized the
Elizabethan seamen and those of Nelsonian times.