But, whether to be realized there or in England, he panted for the charms of home which he had never known.

"I am fixed," he tells her, "to live a country life, and to have many (I hope) years of comfort, which God knows, I never yet had--only moments of happiness,"-- a pathetic admission of the price he had paid for the glory which could not satisfy him, yet which, by the law of his being, he could not cease to crave.

"I wish for happiness to be my reward, and not titles or money;" and happiness means being with her whom he repeatedly calls Santa Emma, and his "guardian angel,"-- a fond imagining, the sincerity of which checks the ready smile, but elicits no tenderness for a delusion too gross for sympathy.
Whatever sacrifices he might be ready to make for his country's service, he was not willing to give up all he held dear when the real occasion for his exceptional powers had passed away; and the assurances that the service absolutely required his presence in the Baltic made no impression upon him.

He knew better.

"Had the command been given me in February," he said, "many lives would have been saved, and we should have been in a very different situation; but the wiseheads at home know everything." Now it means expense and suffering, and nothing to do beyond the powers of an average officer.
"Any other man can as well look about him as Nelson." "Sir Thomas Troubridge," he complains, after enumerating his grievances, "had the nonsense to say, now I was a Commander-in-Chief I must be pleased.
Does he take me for a greater fool than I am ?" It was indeed shaving pretty close to insult to send out a man like Nelson as second, when great work was in hand, and then, after he had done all his superior had permitted, and there was nothing left to do, to tell him that he was indispensable; but to be congratulated upon the fact by a Lord of the Admiralty, which Troubridge then was, was rather too much.