While he was striving to gain assistance for the Maltese, he does not
forget to sustain them with hopes, not always too well founded. He
tells Ball he trusts the Messina troops will soon be with him. "You
may depend, in October, I will get 2,000 men on shore at Malta. Niza
is ordered to Lisbon, but I have directed his stay off Malta." He
appeals personally to the British commander at Messina, and to the
Russian minister at Palermo, reminding the latter how dear Malta and
its Order were to his sovereign. "Malta, my dear Sir, is in my
thoughts sleeping or waking." The Portuguese, he tells him, are
ordered home; but, wishing Russian assistance, he does not say that he
has stopped them,--as to which, indeed, he could not feel sure.

The same object pressed upon him while in Port Mahon, and he
succeeded, by his personal enthusiasm, in arousing Erskine's interest
in the matter; but the latter was loaded to the muzzle with
objections. "Sir James," said Nelson to Troubridge, with the amusing
professional prejudice they both entertained, "enters upon the
difficulty of the undertaking in a true soldier way." "I am just come
from Sir James," he wrote to Hamilton on the 13th of October. "He sees
all the difficulty of taking Malta in the clearest point of views, and
therefore it became an arduous task to make him think that with God's
blessing the thing was possible." He has, however, consented to
prepare fifteen hundred men with stores and equipments, but only on
condition that the Russians will also give a thousand,--a further
draft on Nelson's diplomacy,--and a thousand be landed from the
squadron, etc. Besides, there is the further difficulty that a
superior officer is expected from England, and what will he say? And
will Erskine be justified in sending men before his entirely uncertain
arrival? It may be imagined what such proceedings were to Nelson's
nervous, ardent, unhesitating temperament, and they elicited the