Nevertheless there is, in truth, little which appeals to the imagination of posterity in the story of that drab martyrdom. Moreover Collingwood is judged, not individually but by comparison. For ever he is obscured by the more dazzling vision of Nelson. It weighs little in his favour that, devoid of the vanity and the weakness which made of the latter a lesser man even though a greater genius, Collingwood, throughout his life, exhibited a nobility of soul which was never marred by one self-seeking thought, one mean word, one base action. That very fact militates against him. Collingwood had no dramatic instinct, and in the great issues of life he never played to the gallery; he has not even attached to his memory, as has Nelson, the glamour of a baffling and arresting intrigue. And there remains eternally to his disfavour that he did not die at the psychological moment. Whether he was, as some recent researches might lead us to believe, a greater strategist than Nelson, as he was undoubtedly a man of stronger principles and more disinterested motives, of wider education and of profounder political insight, it is not our province here to inquire. On his column in Trafalgar Square, to all time, Nelson stands aloft surveying the generations who do him homage; far away, on the shores of Tynemouth, a solitary figure of Collingwood, not erected till 1845, gazes out across the ocean of his exile. It is as though the loneliness which tortured that great soul in life haunts him beyond the grave, as the adulation which was balm to Nelson's soul remains his portion to all eternity. There might even be imagined an unconscious irony in the last reference to Collingwood which occurs in the Stanhope correspondence, wherein Mrs Stanhope, after the first horror which the news of her kinsman's death had evoked, sums up thus the immediate effect of that event upon her family life:-- _May 10th._ London is very gay now.... To give you some idea how we go on, I will mention some of our engagements. To-night Opera; tomorrow, concerts at Mrs Boehms and Lady Castlereagh's; Thursday, Dow. Lady Glyn, Lady de Crespygny musick, and Lady Westmorland's; Saturday, Opera; 23rd., 24th and 26th Balls. On Friday, of course, there are cards, but I shall not go out on account of its being the funeral of our justly-lamented friend. CHAPTER III 1806-1807 ON DITS FROM YORKSHIRE, LONDON AND RAMSGATE Three years before his death, in the midst of the stress and labour which was undermining his bodily strength, Collingwood had written with regard to this same wearing anxiety--"My astonishment is to find that in England this does not seem to enter into the minds of the people, or at least not to interrupt their gaieties. England on the verge of ruin requires the care of all; but when that _all_ is divided and contending for power, then it is that the foundation shakes."