constant contact, as by daily acquaintance, with a personality of
mingled weakness and strength, of grave faults as well as of great
virtues, but one whose charm was felt in life by all who knew it. The
second object, far less ambitious, is to present a clear narrative of
the military career, of the mighty deeds of arms, of this first of
British seamen, whom the gifts of Nature and the course of History
have united to make, in his victories and in their results, the
representative figure of the greatest sea-power that the world has
known.

It will not be thought surprising that we have, of the first thirty
years of Nelson's life, no such daily informal record as that which
illustrates the comparatively brief but teeming period of his active
fighting career, from 1793 to 1805, when he at once, with inevitable
directness and singular rapidity, rose to prominence, and established
intimate relations with numbers of his contemporaries. A few
anecdotes, more or less characteristic, have been preserved concerning
his boyhood and youth. In his early manhood we have his own account,
both explicit and implied in many casual unpremeditated phrases, of
the motives which governed his public conduct in an episode occurring
when, scarcely yet more than a youth, he commanded a frigate in the
West Indies,--the whole singularly confirmatory, it might better be
said prophetic, of the distinguishing qualities afterwards so
brilliantly manifested in his maturity. But beyond these, it is only
by the closest attention and careful gleaning that can be found, in
the defective and discontinuous collection of letters which remains
from his first thirty years, the indisputable tokens, in most
important particulars, of the man that was to be.

The external details of this generally uneventful period can be