rapidly summarized. He was born on the 29th of September, 1758, the
fifth son and sixth child of Edmund Nelson, then rector of the parish
of Burnham Thorpe, in Norfolk, a county which lies along the eastern
coast of England, bordering the North Sea. His mother, whose name
before marriage was Catherine Suckling, was grandniece to Sir Robert
Walpole, the famous prime minister of Great Britain during twenty
years of the reigns of the first two Georges. Sir Robert's second
brother was called Horatio; and it was from the latter, or from his
son, that the future hero took his baptismal name, which, in a more
common form, was also that of Sir Robert's younger son, the celebrated
letter and memoir writer, Horace Walpole.

Of the eleven children borne by Nelson's mother in her eighteen wedded
years, only two lived to grow old. She herself died at forty-two; and
her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, of the Royal Navy, was also cut
off in the prime of his age. As the earlier Nelsons were unusually
long-lived, it seems probable that a certain delicacy of constitution
was transmitted through the Sucklings to the generation to which the
admiral belonged. He was himself, at various periods through life, a
great sufferer, and frequently an invalid; allusions to illness, often
of a most prostrating type, and to his susceptibility to the
influences of climate or weather, occur repeatedly and at brief
intervals throughout his correspondence. This is a factor in his
career which should not be lost to mind; for on the one hand it
explains in part the fretfulness which at times appears, and on the
other brings out with increased force the general kindly sweetness of
his temper, which breathed with slight abatement through such
depressing conditions. It enhances, too, the strength of purpose that
trod bodily weakness under foot, almost unconsciously, at the call of
duty or of honor. It is notable, in his letters, that the necessity