But however this may be, the immediate facts all show that the man who crowned and completed the work which Francis Drake and his brother pirates began came of a stock that seemed to promise but little in the way of hereditary battle-winning. Every one on his father’s side appears either to have been a parson or to have married one. His mother’s father was a parson too, but happily she had a brother Maurice who was a captain in the Navy, and had done some very good work at a time when good work was badly wanted. This gallant sailor was a great grand-nephew of Sir John Suckling, the poet, and it may be noticed, in passing, that on the 21st of October, 1757, the day which we now know as the anniversary of Trafalgar--Captain Maurice Suckling in the _Dreadnought_, in company with two other sixty-gun ships, attacked seven large French men-of-war off Cape François in the West Indies, and gave them such a hammering that they were very thankful for the wind which enabled them to escape. But still more noteworthy is the opinion of Captain Maurice Suckling of his nephew when he first received his father’s request to give him a place on board his ship. “What,” he wrote in reply to the application, “has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.” The weakness here somewhat grimly alluded to was the curse of Nelson’s existence from the day that he first set foot on the deck of a ship to the moment when the bullet from the mizen-top of the _Redoubtable_ made his almost constant bodily suffering a matter of minutes. His physical infirmities, or at any rate the weakness of his body as compared with the vast strength and tireless energy of his mind, bring him into very close relationship with William of Orange. Putting nationality aside, he was, in fact, on the sea what William was on land, and the central point in his policy was also the same--tireless and unsparing hostility to France. With Nelson, indeed, this appears to have gone very near to the borders of fanaticism. Some of his sayings with regard to the Frenchmen of his day are absolutely ferocious. Hatred and contempt are about equally blended in them. “Hate a Frenchman as you would hate the devil!” was with him an axiom and was his usual form of advice to midshipmen on entering the service. On one occasion in the Mediterranean he said to one of his captains who had got into a dispute about the property which the defeated French garrison at Gaieta were to be allowed to take away with them: “I am sorry that you had any altercation with them. There is no way to deal with a Frenchman but to knock him down. To be civil to him is only to be laughed at when they are enemies.”