Its analogy to a military situation is striking.

There was a wrong condition of things to be righted--a victory to be won.

To achieve this a great risk must be taken, and he was willing to take it; but in so doing he made such choice of his ground as to be practically unassailable--to attain his end without lasting harm to himself.

That Nelson would have managed better had he been ten years older is very probable.

Likely enough he betrayed some of the carelessness of sensibilities which the inexperience of youth is too apt to show towards age; but, upon a careful review of the whole, it appears to the writer that his general course of action was distinctly right, judged by the standards of the time and the well-settled principles of military obedience, and that he pursued an extremely difficult line of conduct with singular resolution, with sound judgment, and, in the main, with an unusual amount of tact, without which he could scarcely have failed, however well purposing, to lay himself open to serious consequences.