A man like the Admiral, so inexhaustible in emergencies, but so prone to sink back into a low state of vitality between whiles, was more than ordinarily likely to slip into such an arrangement easily. Attending state banquets and galas was always peculiarly exhausting to him, except where he had some diplomatic problem that roused his energy, or companionship in which he delighted. By what I knew of the Admiral I do not see that there is anything in the portion of the Journal above quoted which might not have been written by him. The sole difficulty is to account for the existence of such a journal without his trusted Will ever having seen a trace of it, in his constant personal attendance. CHAPTER XI.--How the Admiral entered the maze of Neapolitan Politics. Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, was more of a man than her husband, though he was of great stature and much addicted to the chase. The daughter of Maria Theresa, the sister of Marie Antoinette, it was not surprising that she should have beauty and capacity in no common degree. History has it that she was of coarser fibre than her mother and sister; it was perhaps necessary for the part she had to play. Marie Antoinette could be reckless, Maria Carolina is said to have stopped at nothing which stood in the way of her desires, except that she was loyal in her friendships and her hatreds. After a lengthy period of a kind of social purgatory, Lady Hamilton had been admitted into the truly Oriental paradise of the Neapolitan Court. The Queen did not do things by halves. When once her Ladyship had been admitted to the court, she was rapidly admitted to the Queen's intimacy. My Lady's beauty and high spirits, her usefulness in the _al fresco_ entertainments in which the King and Queen delighted, and for which she had a perfect genius, and her extreme popularity, made her desirable to a dissolute court which lived in the frankest way for pleasure. And every one knows now that she served the Queen in another capacity, unsuspected by any except those in her confidence and that of the British leaders at Naples.