Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/212

 lee line was approaching the enemy, Nelson hoisted the celebrated signal, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’; and a few minutes later Collingwood, in the Royal Sovereign, dashed in among the enemy's rear. Nelson had reserved for himself the task of restraining the enemy's van should it attempt to support the rear; the Victory was thus long exposed to the enemy's fire, and sustained heavy loss, before Nelson was satisfied that no immediate movement of the van was to be apprehended. About one o'clock the Victory broke into the enemy's centre, passing slowly under the stern of Villeneuve's flagship, the Bucentaure, and pouring in a most terrible broadside, which is said to have dismounted twenty guns, and to have killed or wounded four hundred men. As she drew clear of the Bucentaure, she ran foul of the 74-gun ship Redoubtable, and her foreyard catching in the Redoubtable's rigging, the two ships fell alongside each other, and so remained. It was thus that between the two there followed a very singular duel. The Victory's broadside was superior to that of the Redoubtable, and drove the French from their guns; but the musketry of the Redoubtable was superior to that of the Victory, and cleared her upper deck. For a short while it seemed to the French possible for them to board the English ship, and capture her in a hand-to-hand fight; but a storm of grape from the Victory's forecastle put a deadly end to the attempt. It was just at this moment that Nelson, walking the quarter-deck with Captain Hardy [see ], was wounded by a musket-shot from the Redoubtable's mizen-top, which, striking the left epaulette, passed down through the lungs, through the spine, and lodged in the muscles of the back. He fell to the deck, and as Hardy attempted to raise him said, ‘They've done for me at last, Hardy.’ ‘I hope not,’ answered Hardy. ‘Yes,’ replied Nelson; ‘my backbone is shot through.’ He was carried below; but, though the wound was from the first recognised as mortal, he lived for three hours longer in great pain, expressing, between the paroxysms, the keenest anxiety about the action. When Hardy brought him word that fourteen or fifteen of the enemy's ships had surrendered, he exclaimed, ‘That is well; but I bargained for twenty.’ Later on he said, ‘Remember, I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Horatia as a legacy to my country;’ and, with the words ‘Thank God, I have done my duty,’ expired about half-past four, on 21 Oct. 1805, almost as the French Achille blew up and the Intrépide struck her flag.

Nelson's body, preserved in spirits, was brought home in the Victory, and, after lying in state in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, was taken to London, and in a public funeral buried on 9 Jan. 1806 in the crypt of St. Paul's. The sarcophagus which contains the coffin was made at the expense of Cardinal Wolsey for the burial of Henry VIII. The monument in the cathedral above is by Flaxman. Nelson is also commemorated in London by Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, commenced in 1829, and ornamented with the Nelson column, which was completed in 1849. It is surmounted by a colossal statue by E. H. Baily, 18 feet in height. The bronze lions, from Landseer's designs, were added in 1867. There is a Nelson monument on the Calton Hill, Edinburgh, and a Nelson pillar in Sackville (now O'Connell) Street, Dublin. Other monuments in many different parts of the country were erected to his memory, and poets and poetasters hymned his fame in many languages with but indifferent success. Neither then nor since has any happier threnody been suggested than Virgil's lines:  In freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbræ Lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet, Semper honos, nomenque tuum, laudesque manebunt. (Æneid, i. 607–9). By his wife Nelson had no issue (for an account of the Nelson peerage see under, first ). By Lady Hamilton he had one daughter, Horatia, who grew up, married the Rev. Philip Ward, afterwards vicar of Tenterden, Kent, and died in 1881. Another daughter, Emma, born in the end of 1803 or beginning of 1804, survived only a few weeks.

Nelson's portraits are very numerous, and many of them have been engraved. Among the best are a full-length, by Hoppner, in St. James's Palace, and a half-length, by Lemuel F. Abbot, in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. Another, also by Abbot, closely resembling this, is in the National Portrait Gallery, as well as a painting by Heinrich Füger, for which Nelson sat while at Vienna in 1800. A portrait by Zoffany is at the admiralty; one by J. F. Rigaud, R.A., which Nelson presented to Captain William Locker in 1781, belongs to Earl Nelson, who owns another painted by L. Guzzardi in 1799. (See also Catalogue of the Naval Exhibition of 1891.) Arthur William Devis [q. v.] painted after Nelson's death the well-known ‘Death of Nelson in the Cockpit of H.M.S. Victory,’ which is now at Greenwich Hospital. The engraving by W. Bromley (dated 1812) has long been popular.