It has been said that when a nation is on the brink of ruin the Fates either hasten its end or send some great man to restore its fortunes. It certainly was thus with the Britain of Nelson’s early youth. On the 17th of October, 1781, Lord Hawke, the victor of Quiberon Bay, and the last of the great line of seamen of whom Admiral Blake was the first, died, leaving, as Horace Walpole said the next day in the House of Commons, his mantle to nobody. Apparently, there was no one worthy to wear it. The fortunes of England were indeed at a low ebb. Both her naval and military prestige had very seriously declined. The American colonies had been lost by the worst of statesmanship at home and the worst of bungling incompetence and cowardice abroad. We had been beaten by the raw colonists on land and by the French and Dutch at sea. At home the very highest circles of the realm were polluted by such corruption and crippled by such imbecility as would be absolutely incredible to us now, Imagine, for instance, what would be thought to-day of the post of Secretary of State for War being given to a man who had been explicitly declared by a court martial to be absolutely incapable of serving his country in any military capacity!--and yet this is only one example out of many of the flagrant abuses of this amazingly disgraceful period. Happily, however, for the honour of the race and the safety of the Empire there had been born, twenty-three years before to a country parson in Norfolk, a boy, the fifth in a family of eleven, who fourteen years later was destined to die in the moment of victory, happy in the knowledge that he had not left his country a single enemy to fight throughout the length and breadth of the High Seas. When Horace Walpole spoke his panegyric on Lord Hawke he would probably have been very much surprised if he had been told that it was this then insignificant and unknown cousin of his own who was not only to take up the mantle of the hero of Quiberon, but to bequeath it in his turn, not to a rival or a successor, but to the country which his last triumph left mistress of the seas. Although there doesn’t seem to be any direct proof, it may be admitted that there is sufficiently strong presumption to warrant us in believing, if we choose to do so, that Horatio Nelson, son of the Rev. Edmund Nelson, Rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, could one way or another have traced a lineage back to the old Sea Kings of the North. Certainly he must have had some of the blood of those who fought the Armada in his veins, and it is noteworthy that a Danish poet in celebrating his valour, wisdom, and clemency during and after the great battle of Copenhagen, attempted to soothe the wounded pride of his countrymen by pointing out that Nelson was indubitably a Danish name and that after all they had only been beaten by the descendant of one of their old Sea Kings.