Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/213

  [The bibliography of Nelson is enormous, but comparatively little of it has any real value. Even before his death a memoir had been published by Charnock, from materials supplied by Captain Locker, which in any other hands than Charnock's would have been a useful and interesting work. Other memoirs were published in quick succession as soon as the news of his death reached England. Of these, one only calls for any mention: that by Harrison, an obscure writer engaged by Lady Hamilton to exalt her claims on the government. It is in execrable taste, of no authority, and crowded with statements demonstrably false. And yet some of them, through the influence of other writers, and more especially of Southey, have passed current as facts; among which may be mentioned the celebrated ‘If there were more Emmas there would be more Nelsons,’ a story which is entirely without authority, and is contradicted by the natural and connected account of the conversation given by Blackwood (, vii. 26). Clarke and McArthur's Life of Nelson, in two most unwieldy 4to vols., is the fullest, and in many respects the best biography. It is largely based on original documents and letters entrusted to the authors—many of which have never been seen since—but it is crowded with childish and irrelevant stories, resting on hearsay or tradition, and very probably not true. The only work treating of Nelson's professional career which is to be implicitly trusted is the collection of his Despatches and Letters, edited by Sir N. Harris Nicolas, in seven vols. 8vo; a selection from which, with a few additional documents and notes, has been edited by the present writer. The celebrated life by Southey, interesting as it always will be as a work of art, has no original value, but is a condensation of Clarke and McArthur's ponderous work, dressed to catch the popular taste, and flavoured, with a very careless hand, from the worthless pages of Harrison, from Miss Williams's Manners and Opinions in the French Republic towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, i. 123–223, and from Captain Foote's Vindication. There is no doubt that Southey's artistic skill gave weight and currency to the falsehoods of Miss Williams, as it did to the trash of Harrison and the wild fancies of Lady Hamilton. Of other works that have some biographical value may be especially named the Life, by the Old Sailor (M. H. Barker), and the Vindication of Lord Nelson's Proceedings in the Bay of Naples, by Commander Jeaffreson Miles. Parson's Nelsonian Reminiscences are the recollections of his boyhood by an elderly man, and not to be implicitly trusted. Pettigrew's Life of Nelson, principally interesting from the Nelson-Hamilton correspondence which it first announced, loses a great deal of its value from the writer's ignorance of the naval history of the time, and the confusions into which he allowed Lady Hamilton to lead him; but still more from his reticence as to the documents he quoted. It is only within the last few years that the papers referred to were discovered and added to the collection of Mr. Alfred Morrison, who has increased the obligation under which students of Nelson's history already lay by having a full transcript of them printed. In Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, and the Queen of Naples and Lord Nelson, based to a great extent on these valuable papers, Mr. J. C. Jeaffreson has traced the relations of Nelson and Lady Hamilton. (See art. .) A valuable examination of Nelson's services, and more especially of his chase of Villeneuve to the West Indies, is in Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire; and, from the French point of view, in Chevalier's Histoire de la Marine française (1) sous la première République, et (2) sous le Consulat et l'Empire. The well-known Guerres Maritimes, by Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, is based almost entirely on Nicolas or James, and has no independent value.]

 NELSON, JAMES (1710–1794), author, born in 1710, followed the profession of an apothecary for fifty years in Red Lion Square, Holborn, London. He was well known in contemporary literary circles, and wrote two works which were highly praised by the critics. They are: 1. ‘An Essay on the Government of Children under three general heads: Health, Manners, and Education,’ London, 1753, in which the mistaken prejudices of the time on the subject are carefully refuted. 2. ‘The Affectionate Father, a sentimental Comedy; together with Essays on Various Subjects,’ London, 1786. In this various moral truths were taught in the form of a play. Nelson died in London on 19 April 1794.

[Nichols's Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, ix. 14; Gent. Mag. 1753 p. 508, 1794 pt. i. p. 389.]  NELSON, JOHN (1660–1721), New England statesman, born in 1660, son of William Nelson, appears to have gone to New England about 1680. His father's uncle, Sir Thomas Temple, became, by purchase, one of the proprietors of Nova Scotia after its conquest by England in 1654, and after the Restoration he was appointed governor of that dependency. This brought Nelson into communication with the French settlers, and in 1687 he gave a letter of introduction to Villebon the governor of Nova Scotia, then restored to the French, when Villebon was about to pass through Boston on his way to New York.

Nelson was a churchman, and, as in the case of Temple, there were barriers of tastes and character which separated him from his