NELSON LETTERS

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 March 1937, Page 3

NELSON LETTERS

“BONAPARTE WAS SHOT” Every schoolboy knows that Nelson lost his right eye on July 12, 1794, and his right arm on July 24, 1797, but was Nelson right in stating that Napoleon was shot in the leg on July 12. 1799? asks the “Daily Telegraph.” A letter is to appear at Sotheby’s addressed to Admiral John Duckworth on July 23, 1799, in which Nelson—who was always a good hater of his foes—states:

On the 12th Bonaparte was shot in the leg, four generals, 85 officers, and 4000 men have been killed, the siege is raised, and the French are all dying with disease, thank God! So perish all villainy!

“The siege,” of course, refers to that of St. Jean d’Acre, but on July 12, 1799, Bonaparte was addressing his letters from Cairo, and on July 25, 1799, he was well enough to give a rare beating to the Turks at Aboukir —a victory which glazed over a disastrous campaign and enabled him to return to France with some show’ of glamour. When Nelson was receiving the news which caused him to feel this elation he was on board the Foudroyant, off Naples. If his information were correct, it is a strange coincidence that Napoleon should have been shot in the leg exactly five years after Nelson lost his right eye.

This Duckworth dossier contains other lively Nelson missives. In August, 1799, he asks his friend to rejoice with him on the entire liberation of Sardinia “from French Robbers.” and, three years later, makes the rash prophecy that "Bonaparte is mounted on such a mad. capering horse that I think that he will get a fall never to rise again.” There are many other interesting letters and papers in the sale’. Students and lovers of Robert Burns’s poetry should be much attracted by the announcement that eight lines of a poem believed to be in the hand of burns have been sent to Sotheby’s by Mr. H. D. Tyler, of New York. These lines are on the back of some verses of the well-known poem “Ay Wanken O," and run: x Green sleeves and tartan ties Mary my true love where she lies; I’ll be at her eer she rise, My fiddle and I thegither. Bt it by the chrystal burn, Be it by the milk-white thorn, 1 shall rouse her in the morn,

Aly fiddle and 1 thegither. In Shakespeare’s day there was a ballad of "Greene oieeves.” Did Burns write another?