I hope you may be able, at some debate, to say, as your partiality has said before, 'Nelson has done more than he has done before;' I can assure you it shall be a stimulus to my exertion on the day of battle....

Whatever happens, I have run a glorious race." On the 12th of October Nelson received a piece of news which elicited instantaneously a flash of action, illustrative at once of the promptness of his decisions and of the briskness of temper that has been noted already.

A letter arrived from Captain Gore, commanding the detachment outside of the Straits, that two frigates, sent from the Brest squadron by Admiral Cornwallis, had arrived, with a captain senior to himself, who had taken him under his orders, and carried two of Nelson's frigates off Cadiz to intercept the Spanish treasure-fleet expected there from America.

Cornwallis's action had been taken by orders from England, but no communication to that effect, either from him or from the Admiralty, reached Nelson at this moment.

Astounded by a measure which could scarcely fail to cause war, and convinced, as he said, that Spain had no wish to go to war with Great Britain, he gave himself a night to pause; but early next day he wrote to the Admiralty, intimating pretty plainly that, if done by its direction, this was not the way the commander of the Mediterranean fleet should receive word of so momentous a step taken in his district, while to Gore he sent emphatic orders to disobey Cornwallis, although the latter was Nelson's senior.