- end_line
- 798
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.879Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 764
- text
- various reasons it was possible to anchor the fleet, then plausibly
enough the Bethamites of war may urge the above.
But he _might have been_ is but boggy ground to build on. And certainly
in foresight as to the larger issue of an encounter, and anxious
preparations for it--buoying the deadly way and mapping it out, as at
Copenhagen--few commanders have been so painstakingly circumspect as
this reckless declarer of his person in fight.
Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish
considerations, is surely no special virtue in a military man; while an
excessive love of glory, exercising to the uttermost the honest
heart-felt sense of duty, is the first. If the name _Wellington_ is not
so much of a trumpet to the blood as the simpler name _Nelson_, the
reason for this may perhaps be inferred from the above. Alfred in his
funeral ode on the victor of Waterloo ventures not to call him the
greatest soldier of all time, though in the same ode he invokes Nelson
as ‘the greatest sailor since the world began.’
At Trafalgar Nelson on the brink of opening the fight sat down and wrote
his last brief will and testament. If under the presentiment of the most
magnificent of all victories, to be crowned by his own glorious death, a
sort of priestly motive led him to dress his person in the jewelled
vouchers of his own shining deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for
the altar and the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then affectation and
fustian is each truly heroic line in the great epics and dramas, since
in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations of
sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being given,
vitalises into acts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- title
- Chunk 2