Part 9

When the lad was brought before Nelson, he embraced him, and told the prince that the youth deserved to be made an admiral. "If, my lord," was the answer, "I were to make all my brave officers admirals, I should have no captains or lieutenants in my service."

Nelson, brave to rashness himself, admired it in others. When, early in 1800, in the Mediterranean, Le Généreux, one of the ships that had escaped at the battle of the Nile, was captured, Nelson patted the head of a little midshipman, who was very pale, and asked him how he relished the music. He told the boy how Charles XII. ran away from the first shot he heard, but was afterwards called "the Great" for his bravery. "I therefore hope much from you in future," said the admiral.

Nelson was made a viscount for the battle of Copenhagen. His estates and titles were to go to his father, to his brother William, and then to the male heirs of Nelson's sisters, Mrs. Bolton, and next Mrs. Matcham.

In very poor health he returned to England, and was welcomed to the home of Sir William Hamilton, at 23 Piccadilly.

By the wish of Nelson, Lady Hamilton purchased a country home for him, called Merton Place, in Surrey, eight miles from London. "It would make you laugh," wrote Sir William, "to see Emma and her mother fitting up pig-stys and hen-coops, and already the canal is enlivened with ducks, and the cock is strutting with his hens about the walks.... I have lived with our dear Emma several years. I know her merit, have a great opinion of the head and heart that God Almighty has been pleased to give her, but a seaman alone could have given a fine woman full power to choose and fit up a residence for him without seeing it himself."

On Oct. 29, 1821, Viscount Nelson took his seat in the House of Lords. The following year, in May, the Rev. Edmund Nelson, the father of the admiral, was coming to live with his son and the Hamiltons at Merton Place; but he died at Burnham Thorpe, April 26, at the age of seventy-nine.

During the summer of 1802, Nelson journeyed to Wales with the family of his brother, the Rev. William Nelson, and the Hamiltons, and everywhere received the homage of the people. Oxford gave him the freedom of the city in a gold box, and the degree of D.C.L. to him and to Sir William. He passed under triumphal arches, medals were struck in his honor, and crowds escorted him with lighted torches.

The next year, 1803, England and France, or, in reality, England and Napoleon, were again at war. Nelson wrote a characteristic note to the Premier:--

"HOUSE OF LORDS, 4 o'clock, March 9, 1803.

"Whenever it is necessary, I am _your_ admiral.

NELSON AND BRONTË."

April 6, 1803, Sir William Hamilton died, holding his wife's and Nelson's hands, saying, "Protect my dear wife; and may God bless you, and give you victory and protect you in battle!" He bequeathed to Nelson a copy of a picture of his wife by Madame Le Brun in enamel. To her he gave a legacy of £800, and an annuity of £800 for life. Sir William's pension of £1,200 a year closed with his death, and, as the government did not continue it, in spite of Sir William's dying wishes, Nelson gave the amount to her, in monthly portions, while he lived.

A month after Sir William's death, Nelson was appointed to the command of the Mediterranean squadron, to take part in the war between England and France. He sailed from Spithead, May 20, in the Victory, and for two years, lacking ten days, did not step out of his ship. They were long, weary years of much illness and loneliness, but devotion to duty. He returned to Merton on the morning of Aug. 20, 1805.

A month later he was again called to serve his country. A third coalition had been formed by England, Russia, Austria, and Sweden against France. Spain had become the ally of the latter.

"I will do my best," he wrote to a friend, "and I hope God Almighty will go with me. I have much to lose, but little to gain; and I go because it is right, and I will serve the country faithfully."

He left Merton Friday night, Sept. 13, at half-past ten, taking a sad leave of his sisters and Lady Hamilton, and kneeling by the bedside of their little girl, Horatia, earnestly prayed that God would protect and bless her. This child was at that time about four and a half years old, having been born in January, 1801.

Nelson writes in his private diary that evening, "At half-past ten drove from dear, dear Merton, where I left all which I hold dear in this world, to go to serve my king and country.... If it is His good providence to cut short my days upon earth, I bow with the greatest submission, relying that He will protect those so dear to me that I may leave behind. His will be done. Amen! Amen! Amen!"

A great crowd gathered to see him embark. Many were in tears, and many knelt before him and blessed him as he passed. He remarked to his dear friend, Captain Hardy, "I had their huzzas before; I have their hearts now."

Sept. 28 the fleet anchored off Cadiz, on the coast of Spain. Nelson knew there must be a fearful battle, and seems to have expected to be killed in it. He took much exercise daily, generally walking the deck for six or seven hours. Such was the activity of his mind that he rarely slept more than two hours at a time. He never thought of himself. He exposed his body, frail as it was, in all kinds of weather, and would not change his clothing when wet through. He disliked to depend much on others, as he was obliged to do, from having but one arm and one eye.

He was very prompt, and made good use of time. He once said to General Twiss, "Time, Twiss, time is everything. Five minutes makes the difference between a victory and a defeat."

He was extremely generous. When one of his men, Captain Parker, died, he paid his debts and funeral expenses, about £200. He spent very little for himself, and much for others.

It was thought that there would be a battle on Saturday, Oct. 19; and Nelson wrote two letters, one to "my dearest angel," little Horatia, and the other to Lady Hamilton, whom he would have married, had the divorce laws of England permitted. To her he writes, "May the God of battles crown my endeavors with success; at all events, I will take care that my name shall ever be most dear to you and Horatia, both of whom I love as much as my own life."

On Monday, Oct. 21, the fleets, now off Cape Trafalgar, below Cadiz, were ready for action. The English had twenty-seven sail-of-the-line and four frigates; the French and Spanish thirty-three sail-of-the-line and seven frigates. The English had 2,542 guns; the French and Spanish, 3,042 guns.

Nelson told the men who removed the picture of Lady Hamilton, which always hung in his cabin in the Victory, to "take care of his guardian angel." He wore a miniature of her next his heart. Then he wrote an earnest prayer, and a codicil to his will, in which he asked his country to reward Lady Hamilton for her services, leaving her and his child, Horatia, "a legacy to my king and country, that they will give her [Lady Hamilton] an ample provision to maintain her rank in life. These are the only favors I ask of my king and country, at this moment when I am going to fight their battle."

He wore his admiral's coat, which bore on the left breast his decorations. When fears were expressed that these would make him a mark for the enemy, he said, "In honor I gained them, and in honor I will die with them."

He gave orders for that well-known signal, "England expects that every man will do his duty," which was received with tremendous cheering. "You must be quick," he said to Lieutenant Pasco, "for I have one more to make, which is for close action."

"Now," said Nelson, "I can do no more. We must trust to the great Disposer of all events, and the justice of our cause. I thank God for this great opportunity of doing my duty."

The Royal Sovereign, one hundred guns, under Vice-Admiral Collingwood, was the first to get into action, a little past noon. The men were ordered to lie down upon the decks as she swept into the foe. She gave the great Spanish ship, Santa Ana, a broadside with double-shotted guns, killing and wounding four hundred men. Nelson shouted, "Bravo! What a glorious salute the Royal Sovereign is in!"

Seven or eight ships soon opened on the Victory. As Nelson and Captain Hardy walked the deck a splinter struck the foot of the latter, tearing the buckle from his shoe. "This is too warm work, Hardy, to last long," said Nelson with a smile.

About half-past one, as they were walking, Nelson was shot by Sergeant Robert Guillemard of the French ship Redoubtable, who was stationed in the rigging of his ship, singling out officers for his aim.

Nelson fell on his face, in the blood where his secretary, Scott, had been killed. "They have done for me at last, Hardy," he said; "my backbone is shot through."

He was lifted and carried below, among the dead and dying. On the way thither, using one hand, he covered his face and his decorations with his handkerchief, that his men might not see who had fallen.

He was laid on a midshipman's bed, and covered with a sheet. As often as a ship surrendered, the men of the Victory cheered, and Nelson's dying face would light up with joy. Nothing could be done for the hero, but to fan him with paper and give him lemonade to quench his thirst. His thoughtfulness of others was strong even in his dying hour. A poor fellow near him was jarred or hurt by another in passing, and Nelson reproved the man for his carelessness.

He frequently asked for Captain Hardy, whom he loved; but Hardy was not able to leave his post till an hour and ten minutes after Nelson was wounded.

When he came, they shook hands in silence, and Hardy turned away to conceal his grief. "Well, Hardy, how goes the battle?"--"Very well, my lord. We have got twelve or fourteen of the enemy's ships in our possession."

"I hope," said Nelson, "that none of our ships have struck?"

"No, my lord, there is no fear of that."

"I am a dead man, Hardy. I am going fast--it will be all over with me soon. Come nearer to me. Let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things belonging to me."

Hardy hastened to the deck and returned in about fifty minutes. Nelson exclaimed, "Anchor, Hardy, anchor! Don't throw me overboard, Hardy."

"Oh, no, certainly not," said Hardy.

"Then you know what to do. Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy! take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Kiss me, Hardy."

The captain knelt and pressed his lips to his cheek. "Now I am satisfied," he said. "Thank God, I have done my duty." Hardy knelt again and kissed his forehead. "Who is that?" he said faintly. "It is Hardy." "God bless you, Hardy," said Nelson, and Hardy went again on deck.

To his chaplain, Dr. Scott, Nelson said, "Doctor, I have _not_ been a _great_ sinner," and after a short pause, "Remember that I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Horatia as a legacy to my country." His speaking now became difficult. "Thank God, I have done my duty," were his last words. At half-past four he passed away peacefully. He lived long enough to know that a great victory had been won.

Of the thirty-three ships in the French and Spanish fleets, nineteen were taken and destroyed by the English. Most of the rest became prizes, but were wrecked in a gale. The English lost in killed and wounded about three thousand; the French and Spanish about five thousand. "The greatest sea victory that the world had ever known was won," says W. Clark Russell, "but at such a cost, that there was no man throughout the British fleet--there was no man indeed in all England--but would have welcomed defeat sooner than have paid the price of this wonderful conquest."

The body of Nelson was carried in a cask of brandy in the Victory till she reached Spithead, Dec. 12, five weeks after the battle. It was afterwards placed in the coffin made from the mast of L'Orient, enclosed in a leaden coffin, with a handsome wooden coffin outside of these.

All England was bowed with grief at the death of Nelson. He was the idol of the nation, despite his unhappy marriage and his unlawful love for the devoted Lady Hamilton. The king was unable to speak for a long time after he heard the news, and the queen wept aloud. In Naples, writes Coleridge, "Numbers stopped and shook hands with me because they had seen the tears on my cheek and conjectured that I was an Englishman; and several, as they held my hand, themselves burst into tears."

Nelson was buried Jan. 9, 1806, in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, at a public expense of £14,000. Ten thousand troops preceded the body of the hero to the tomb. The streets were lined with thousands of troops and hundreds of thousands of weeping spectators. The coffin was drawn uncovered, under a canopy, upon a car, having at its front and back a carved representation of the head and stern of the Victory.

At the burial, by a sudden impulse, the sailors who lowered the coffin seized the flag which covered it and tore it in shreds, to keep as mementoes of their great leader.

No such funeral had been seen in England. It was felt that the battle of Trafalgar had saved the nation from an invasion by Bonaparte, and therefore no honor was too great for her deliverer.

"The battle of Trafalgar," says Bourrienne, in his Memoirs of Napoleon, "paralyzed our naval force, and banished all hope of any attempt against England."

England raised monuments in many of her large cities to her heroic dead. In Trafalgar Square, London, stands the Nelson column, fluted, surmounted by his statue, while on the sides are representations of his four great battles, St. Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, cast in gun-metal taken from the enemy in these engagements. The four lions by Landseer are at the base.

The government awarded various honors to Nelson's family. An earldom was conferred on Nelson's brother, the Reverend William, with a pension of £5,000 a year, with £120,000 that he might purchase an estate; £20,000 of this gift were to be divided between Nelson's sisters, Mrs. Bolton and Mrs. Matcham. Lady Nelson received £2,000 per annum till her death, May 4, 1831, twenty-five years after the death of Lord Nelson.

Nelson's dying request for Lady Hamilton and their child, Horatia, was disregarded by the government. Nelson left her by will £2,000, an annuity for life of £500 charged on the Bronte estate, Merton Place, and the yearly interest on £4,000 settled on Horatia till she became eighteen.

Lady Hamilton survived Nelson nine years, dying Jan. 16, 1815, in apartments in the Rue Française at Calais, at the age of fifty-one. She lost Merton Place, in Surrey, through debts. She was imprisoned for debt at the King's Bench, 12 Temple Place, in 1813, and was discharged after some months, by a city alderman, J. J. Smith, who felt that she had been cruelly treated. Fearing re-arrest, she went to Calais in 1814, with Horatia, and died in less than a year. Her daughter, who was devoted to her, wrote, years later, "Although often certainly under very distressing circumstances, she never experienced actual want."

Lady Hamilton was buried in a cemetery just outside the city limits, which was soon after used as a timber-yard, and all traces of the graves disappeared. In accordance with her mother's last wishes, Horatia was taken to the home of Mrs. Matcham, Lord Nelson's sister, where she remained two years, and then resided with Mr. Bolton, Lord Nelson's brother-in-law, till her marriage, in February, 1822, to the Rev. Philip Ward, Vicar of Tenterden in Kent. She became the mother of a large family, and died March 6, 1881, in the eighty-first year of her age.

The Rev. William Nelson, made an earl by the successes of his brother, was succeeded in 1835 by his nephew, Thomas Bolton, as second earl, who took the name Nelson. Thomas was succeeded the same year by his son Horatio, the third earl. Lord Nelson is a graduate of Cambridge, where he took the degree of M.A. in 1844. He married a daughter of the second earl of Normanton in 1845.

JOHN BUNYAN.

The first book which Benjamin Franklin owned was "Pilgrim's Progress." This he read over and over.

Sir Humphry Davy, the great scientist, could repeat a large part of "Pilgrim's Progress" before he could read it. Nathaniel Hawthorne read and loved it when he was six years old.

Rufus Choate, the great orator, says E. P. Whipple, "read 'Pilgrim's Progress' when he was six years old; and he not only got it by heart, but eloquently expounded it to his companions, dramatically reproducing the scenes, incidents, and characters of that wonderful allegory, so that the little people he addressed were made to see in it what he saw."

Dr. Thomas Arnold said, "I cannot trust myself to read the account of Christian going up to the celestial gate, after his passage through the river of death.... I hold John Bunyan," he said, "to have been a man of incomparably greater genius than any of them [our old divines], and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity."

"'Pilgrim's Progress' has been translated into more languages," says Canon Edmund Venables, in his life of John Bunyan, "than any other book in the English tongue;" and Southey thinks, "there is no European language into which it has not been translated."

Who wrote it? A travelling tinker, in prison; "A man," says James Anthony Froude, "whose writings have for two centuries affected the spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the world more powerfully than any book or books except the Bible."

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a little village about a mile from Bedford, England, in 1628. "Few villages," says Canon Venables, "are so little modernized as Elstow. The old, half-timbered cottages with overhanging stories, peaked dormers, and gabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, must be much what they were in Bunyan's days."

The parish church is a part of the old Benedictine nunnery, founded here in 1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, in honor of the mother of the Emperor Constantine.

Thomas Bunyan, the father of the renowned author and preacher, was a tinker, "a mender of pots and kettles." He was married to his first wife, Anne Pinney, before he was twenty years of age. She died four years later, apparently without children; and Thomas was soon married again to Margaret Bentley, who became the mother of John Bunyan.

Poor as the parents were, "of that rank," says Bunyan, "that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land ... it pleased God to put it into their hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and write."

There was a school at Bedford at this time, founded in Queen Mary's reign by the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Harpur. Thither probably the lad walked day after day, but he seems to have learned little, and that little he soon forgot.

At an early age he was obliged to help his father at the forge, where, he says, he was "brought up in a very mean condition among a company of poor countrymen."

He soon learned bad habits from the men or boys around him. "From a child," he says, "I had but few equals (considering my years, which were then but tender and few) for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God. Yea, so settled and rooted was I in these things, that they became as a second nature to me."

In the plain home he must have been taught some religious truths by his parents, for at ten years of age he was greatly disturbed on account of his sins. These "did so offend the Lord that even in my childhood he did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions.... These things did so distress my soul, that then in the midst of my many sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let go my sins."

Books the lad did not read, except the not very edifying life of Sir Bevis of Southampton, because the poor tinker's home afforded none.

In the midst of his reckless living--he himself protests that he was never immoral--several remarkable preservations from death had a strong influence on his mind. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning, once in the river Ouse at Bedford, and again in "a creek of the sea." At another time, he says, "Being in the fields with one of my companions, it chanced that an adder passed over the highway; so I, having a stick in my hand, struck her over the back, and having stunned her, I forced open her mouth with my stick, and plucked her sting out with my fingers; by which act, had not God been merciful to me, I might, by my desperateness, have brought myself to my end."

When John Bunyan was about seventeen, he was for a time engaged in the civil wars of the reign of Charles I. Whether he fought for the king or with the Parliamentary forces will never be known. Dr. John Brown, minister at Bedford, thinks he was drafted to fight against the Royalist party.

Here again he was marvellously preserved. "When I was a soldier, I, with others, was drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it; but when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room; to which, when I had consented, he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head and died. Here were judgment and mercy; but neither of them did awaken my soul to righteousness."

Before Bunyan was twenty, a most important matter came into his life. He met a poor girl, an orphan, whose name even is not known, and married her. "I lighted on a wife," he says, "whose father was counted godly. She also would be often telling me what a godly man her father was, and how he would reprove and correct vice, both in his house and amongst his neighbors; what a strict and holy life he lived in his day, both in word and deed....

"This woman and I came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both. But she had for her portion two books, 'The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven,' and 'The Practice of Piety,' which her father had left her when he died. In these two books I sometimes read with her. I found some things pleasing to me, but all this while I met with no conviction." However, they created in him "some desire to religion."

"The Practice of Piety," by Dr. Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor in King James's time, was translated into several languages, and passed through more than fifty editions during a century. The other book was written by the Rev. Arthur Dent, the Puritan pastor of Shoebury in Essex.

Young Bunyan changed his outward life after his marriage. He says, "I fell in with the religion of the times, to go to church twice a day, very devoutly to say and sing as the others did, yet retaining my wicked life."

Exceedingly fond of athletic sports, it was the fashion of the day to enjoy them on Sunday after the sermon. Sometimes the people danced on the village green, or rang the bells for hours, or played tip-cat or other sports.

James I. had issued a proclamation that "his good people should not be disturbed, letted, or discouraged, after the end of the divine service from any lawful recreations, such as dancing, either of men or women; archery for men; leaping, vaulting, or any such harmless recreations."

Bunyan's minister, Vicar Hall, was opposed to these forms of Sabbath breaking, and denounced them from the pulpit in words which the young married man thought were especially aimed at him. He went home "with a great burden upon his spirit," but after dinner, "shook the sermon out of his mind," and went out to play tip-cat on the green.