brothers! My heart swells at the thought of them!"

This strong attachment of the heroic admiral to his fleet, faithfully
repaid by an equal attachment on their part to their admiral, had no
little influence in attuning their hearts to each other; and when he
died, it seemed as if no man was a stranger to another; for all were
made acquaintances by the rights of a common anguish. In the fleet
itself, many a private quarrel was forgotten, no more to be
remembered; many, who had been alienated, became once more good
friends; yea, many a one was reconciled to his very enemy, and loved
and (as it were) thanked him for the bitterness of his grief, as if
it had been an act of consolation to himself in an intercourse of
private sympathy. The tidings arrived at Naples on the day that I
returned to that city from Calabria; and never can I forget the
sorrow and consternation that lay on every countenance. Even to this
day there are times when I seem to see, as in a vision, separate
groups and individual faces of the picture. Numbers stopped and
shook hands with me because they had seen the tears on my cheek, and
conjectured that I was an Englishman; and several, as they held my
hand, burst themselves into tears. And though it may awake a smile,
yet it pleased and affected me, as a proof of the goodness of the
human heart struggling to exercise its kindness in spite of
prejudices the most obstinate, and eager to carry on its love and
honour into the life beyond life, that it was whispered about Naples,
that Lord Nelson had become a good Catholic before his death. The
absurdity of the fiction is a sort of measurement of the fond and
affectionate esteem which had ripened the pious wish of some kind
individual, through all the gradations of possibility and
probability, into a confident assertion, believed and affirmed by
hundreds. The feelings of Great Britain on this awful event have