CHAPTER III.
NELSON'S DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND IN THE "AGAMEMNON."-- SERVICES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN UNTIL THE RECOVERY OF TOULON BY THE FRENCH .-- LORD HOOD IN COMMAND.
FEBRUARY-DECEMBER, 1793.

AGE, 34.
Nelson's page in history covers a little more than twelve years, from February, 1793, to October, 1805.

Its opening coincides with the moment when the wild passions of the French Revolution, still at fiercest heat, and which had hitherto raged like flame uncontrolled, operative only for destruction, were being rapidly mastered, guided, and regulated for efficient work, by the terrors of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety.

In the object to which these tremendous forces were now about to be applied lay the threat to the peace of Europe, which aroused Great Britain to action, and sent into the field her yet unknown champion from the Norfolk parsonage.
The representatives of the French people had imparted to the original movement of their nation,--which aimed only at internal reforms, however radical,--a new direction, of avowed purposeful aggression upon all political institutions exterior to, and differing from, their own.

This became the one characteristic common to the successive forms of government, which culminated in the pure military despotism of Napoleon.
To beat back that spirit of aggression was the mission of Nelson.
Therein is found the true significance of his career, which mounts higher and higher in strenuous effort and gigantic achievement, as the blast of the Revolution swells fiercer and stronger under the mighty impulse of the great Corsican.