one, a master-mind in English Literature, has raised an eternal testimony
to his worth--"Another true knight errant of those days," proclaims
Thackeray, "was Cuthbert Collingwood, and I think, since Heaven made
gentlemen, there is no record of a better one than that. Of brighter
deeds, I grant you, we may read performed by others; but where of a
nobler, kinder, more beautiful life of duty, of a gentler, truer heart?
Beyond dazzle of success and blaze of genius, I fancy shining a hundred
and a hundred times higher the sublime purity of Collingwood's gentle
glory. His heroism stirs British hearts when we recall it. His love and
goodness and piety make one thrill with happy emotion.... There are no
words to tell what the heart feels in reading the simple phrases of such a
hero. Here is victory and courage, but love sublimer and superior."

Nevertheless there is, in truth, little which appeals to the imagination
of posterity in the story of that drab martyrdom. Moreover Collingwood is
judged, not individually but by comparison. For ever he is obscured by the
more dazzling vision of Nelson. It weighs little in his favour that,
devoid of the vanity and the weakness which made of the latter a lesser
man even though a greater genius, Collingwood, throughout his life,
exhibited a nobility of soul which was never marred by one self-seeking
thought, one mean word, one base action. That very fact militates against
him. Collingwood had no dramatic instinct, and in the great issues of life
he never played to the gallery; he has not even attached to his memory, as
has Nelson, the glamour of a baffling and arresting intrigue. And there
remains eternally to his disfavour that he did not die at the
psychological moment. Whether he was, as some recent researches might lead
us to believe, a greater strategist than Nelson, as he was undoubtedly a
man of stronger principles and more disinterested motives, of wider
education and of profounder political insight, it is not our province here
to inquire. On his column in Trafalgar Square, to all time, Nelson stands