But not through flowery paths do genius and heroism tread on their path to fame. What a length of weary way, with what antres vast and deserts idle, and pathless wildernesses bestrown, lay between the Raisonable of 1770 and the Victory of 1805! and yet through them all, the traveller's eye was unalterably fixed on the great light that his soul saw filling the whole sky with its radiance, and which he knew the whole time was reflected from the Baltic, and the Nile, and Trafalgar. The letters of Nelson just given to the public by the industry of Sir Harris Nicolas, will hereafter be the manual of the sailor, as the sister service has found a guide in the _Despatches of the Duke of Wellington_. All that was to be expected from the well-known talent of the editor, united to an enthusiasm for his hero, which has carried him triumphantly through the extraordinary labour of investigating and ascertaining every fact in the slightest degree bearing upon his subject, is to be found in this volume, in which, from the beginning to the end, by a continued series of letters, Nelson is made his own historian; and we sincerely believe, divesting ourselves as far as possible of all prejudice and partiality, that no character ever came purer from the ordeal of unreserved communication--where not a thought is concealed or an expression studied--than the true friend, the good son, the affectionate brother, Horatio Nelson. The correspondence in this volume only extends from 1777 to 1794, and no blot has yet occurred to mar the brightness of a character where there is so much to like, that the reader finds it difficult to dwell on the heroic parts of it which he is only called upon to admire. When the volume ends, he is only thirty-six years old, and is captain of the Agamemnon; but his path is clearly traced out--his name is in men's mouths and his character established. And, looking over the whole correspondence, nothing, perhaps, is so striking as the early development of his peculiar qualities, and the firm unswerving line he struck into from the beginning and continued in to the last. A self-reliance, amounting in weaker and less equally-balanced natures to doggedness and conceit--a clear perception of the circumstances of a case almost resembling intuition--a patriotism verging on the romantic, and a sense of duty never for a moment yielding to the "whips and scorns that patient merit of the unworthy takes," are displayed in every incident of his life, from the time that he left the quiet parsonage-house at Burnham Thorpe, till he finished his glorious career.