Opening paragraphs..........................

Nelson was a paramount naval genius and a natural born predator, and those who look to find a saint besides will miss the man.  The strength of mind is everywhere obvious.  He knew he was right, and in action was daring and direct.  His originality asserts itself again and again, and so does his quixotic generosity.  But in private life, as in war, he was ruthless whenever he had to be, and he could be pitiless.  He was a fanatic for duty, at times beyond all sense, and a royalist so infatuated with the divine right of kings that he began to see himself, in revolutionary times, as the instrument of God.  This made him a good hater.  He hated the American rebels of the thirteen colonies, and the harmless liberal rebels against the Bourbon king of Naples, as unforgivingly as he hated the revolutionary French and then Napoleon.
-Terry Coleman,  The Nelson Touch:  The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson