The features can, if we will, be separately considered, catalogued, and valued; but who ever thus thinks habitually of one he knows well?
Yet to know well must be the aim of biography,--so to present the traits in their totality, without suppression of any, and in their true relative proportions, as to produce, not the blurred or distorted outlines seen through an imperfect lens, but the vivid apprehension which follows long intimacy with its continual, though unconscious, process of correction.
For such a treatment of Nelson's character, copious, if imperfect, material is afforded in his extensive and varied correspondence.

From it the author aims, first, to draw forth a distinct and living image of the man himself, as sketched therein at random and loosely by his own hand.

It is sought to reach the result by keeping the reader in 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.