This biographical memoir, like the character of the immortal man whom it proudly aspires to commemorate, rests on no false claim. It offers not any meretricious attraction to the eye; it submits itself, wholly, to the understanding, and to the heart. Should it fail considerably to gratify the one, and powerfully to interest the other, it will be in vain for the author to urge, however true, that he has exerted himself, with a due sense of the dignity of his subject, and of the difficulty of the task, to produce a work which, though it can never sufficiently honour the incomparable hero, should as little as possible disgrace the kind contributory aids, and the generous patronage, which he has had the distinguished favour to receive from so many estimable and illustrious personages. To add a list of names, might seem ostentatious; but, certainly, such a list would contain almost every great and virtuous character allied to his late lordship, in the bonds of affinity as well as of friendship. With most of these, it will ever constitute the chief pride and happiness of the author's life, that he is also permitted to boast a considerable degree of intimate friendship; and, in the delightful retreat of Merton Place, surrounded by all who were most dear to the heart of the hero, in consanguinity as well as amity, have many of those valuable anecdotes been obtained, with which the work is so abundantly enriched. Prompted to this undertaking, by a strong sense of conviction, that our chief hero, when his character was clearly understood, would be found as eminently good as great, the biographer has fearlessly endeavoured freely to investigate transactions of the utmost delicacy in private life; and he is fully prepared to assert, and as far as possible to prove, that there seldom has existed any human being adorned by the practice of so many positive virtues, so little sullied by any actual vice, as that immortal man, the chief particulars of whose history will be found, the author may, at least, be permitted to maintain, most faithfully recorded in the work now confided, with all it's imperfections, to the just judgment of the world; a tribunal which seldom fails doing compleat justice, either sooner or later, to all the merits both of heroes and of authors, of men as well as of books. THE LIFE OF _LORD NELSON_, DUKE OF BRONTE, &c. * * * * * When we survey, with rapture, the state of an exalted hero, arrived at all the honours which it is possible for a human being to receive from the gratitude, the veneration, and the love, of his fellow-mortals; seen, as he then is, like a luminary of the first magnitude in the full blaze of meridian glory, we are generally too dazzled by the lustre we behold, to penetrate, or even to reflect on, the circuitous, the tedious, or the perplexed path, through which he may have been constrained to pass, in pursuit of the splendid destiny at length happily attained.