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PREFACE
NINE years have passed since I wrote Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson under difficulties, arising from the disappearance of the originals of the Thompson-letters, including the " Now, my own dear wife " letter, which Dr. Pettigrew produced in his Life of Nelson, in evidence that Horatia was the Admiral's daughter by Lady Hamilton, and which the biographer's defamers discredited by declaring them forgeries.
In the absence of these original letters, of whose genuineness I had no doubt, I was constrained to show in a long argumentative essay that, apart -from the, testimony of the(...)"