It was thus that Collingwood came home--that the long exile ended and the tired frame attained to rest. On May 11th, he was laid by the side of Nelson in St Paul's, and the comrades of Trafalgar were re-united in a last repose. The ceremony on this occasion exhibited none of the pomp and circumstance which attended the obsequies of the hero of Trafalgar. In harmony with the wishes and the character of the dead man, so simple was it that the papers emphasise in surprise that "not even the choir service is to be sung on the occasion." And this, possibly, constitutes the sole particular in which England endeavoured to fulfil any desire of the man who had laid down his life in her service. His earnest request that the peerage which had been bestowed upon him might descend to his daughter, his pathetic representation that but for the unremitting nature of that service he would presumably have had a son to succeed him, were callously ignored. There were obvious reasons why Nelson's dying bequest to the nation of the woman he had loved remained unregarded, there was none that that of Collingwood should not have been granted and his barren honours thus made sweet to him. But his generation mourned him with idle tears, and succeeding generations have, possibly, done him scanty justice. Yet one, a master-mind in English Literature, has raised an eternal testimony to his worth--"Another true knight errant of those days," proclaims Thackeray, "was Cuthbert Collingwood, and I think, since Heaven made gentlemen, there is no record of a better one than that. Of brighter deeds, I grant you, we may read performed by others; but where of a nobler, kinder, more beautiful life of duty, of a gentler, truer heart? Beyond dazzle of success and blaze of genius, I fancy shining a hundred and a hundred times higher the sublime purity of Collingwood's gentle glory. His heroism stirs British hearts when we recall it. His love and goodness and piety make one thrill with happy emotion.... There are no words to tell what the heart feels in reading the simple phrases of such a hero. Here is victory and courage, but love sublimer and superior."