And after evening what? Rumour, not altogether devoid of fact, told strange tales of gambling continued far into the night, of money made and money lost, of an insidious enchantment which was beginning to sully the fair soul of Britain’s greatest Admiral. How far the influence of Lady Hamilton led Nelson to neglect his duty is a debatable point. Admiral Mahan points out that on the 22nd October 1798, Nelson wrote to Lord St Vincent to the effect that he had given up his original plan, “which was to have gone to Egypt and attend to the destruction of the French shipping in that quarter,” owing to the King’s desire that he should return to Naples, after having arranged the blockade of Malta. This and similar expressions, says Mahan, “show the anxiety of his mind acting against his judgment.” The late Judge O’Connor Morris, commenting on this phase of the Hero’s career, is most emphatic in his condemnation. His connection with Emma Hamilton “kept him at Naples when he ought to have been elsewhere; it led him to disobey a superior’s orders, on one occasion when there was no excuse; it perhaps prevented him from being present at the siege of Malta. It exposed him, too, to just censure at home, and gave pain and offence to his best friends; and the consciousness that he was acting wrongly soured, in some degree, his nature, and made him morose and at odds with faithful companions in arms.” For the defence there are no more able advocates than Professor Sir J. Knox Laughton and Mr James R. Thursfield, M.A. Nelson, the former asserts, “in becoming the slave of a beautiful and voluptuous woman, did not cease to be a great commander. There is a common idea that his passions detained him at Naples to the neglect of his duty. This is erroneous. He made Naples his headquarters because he was ordered to do so, to provide for the safety of the kingdom and to take measures for the reduction of Malta.” “The point to be observed and insisted on,” Mr Thursfield says, “is that the whole of this pitiful tragedy belongs only to the last seven years of Nelson’s life.” He asks, “Why should the seven years of private lapse be allowed to overshadow the splendid devotion of a lifetime to public duty?” This authority does not deny that during the two years following the victory of the Nile Nelson’s genius “suffered some eclipse,” that his passion for Lady Hamilton was then “in its first transports, when he seemed tied to the Court of the Two Sicilies by other bonds than those of duty, when he annulled the capitulation at Naples and insisted on the trial and execution of Caracciolo,[40] and when he repeatedly disobeyed the orders of Lord Keith.” He further points out that the period is the same “during which his mental balance was more or less disturbed by the wound he had received at the Nile, and his _amour-propre_ was deeply and justly mortified by the deplorable blunder of the Admiralty in appointing Lord