disgrace of a public sentence. They ventured to suggest that, without taking formal notice of the scandal which was abroad in the fleet, he might be sent away to England until his fault was forgotten. Blake looked grave and angry. They, nevertheless, pressed their suit, believing that nature itself would prevent a failure of their application. They appealed to his private affection; they glanced at the offender's want of experience at sea. But it was all to no purpose. Blake answered, that his first duty was to the service. Their very reasoning proved more clearly that this was not a case which could be allowed to pass into a precedent; and, at the conclusion of the interview, he ordered a court-martial to be summoned. "If none of you,' said he, "will accuse him, I must myself be his accuser.' The officers forming the court could only give one sentence on the evidence laid before them; but they sent with it a petition, signed by the entire court, to their admiral, praying him to remit the sentence, and allow the culprit to return to England in his own ship. This prayer was granted, as it would have been in any ordinary case; but the commander added to the painful document the stern words,-" He shall never be employed more." Yet to the brother thus sternly rebuked he left the greater part of his property.-DIXON'S 'Life of Blake.'

IF the jealousy of the parliament and of the nation made it impossible for the king to maintain a formidable standing army, no similar impediment prevented him from making England the first of maritime powers. Both Whigs and Tories were ready to applaud every step to increase the efficiency of that force which, while it was the best protection of the island against foreign enemies, was powerless against civil liberty. All the greatest exploits achieved within the memory of that generation by English soldiers had been achieved in war against English princes. The victories of our sailors had been won over foreign foes, and had averted havoc and rapine from our own soil.

By at least half the nation the battle of Naseby was remem bered with horror, and the battle of Dunbar with pride chequered by many painful feelings; but the defeat of the Armada, and the encounters of Blake with the Hollanders and Spaniards, were recollected with unmixed exultation by all parties. Ever since the Restoration, the Commons, even when most discontented and most parsimonious, had always been bountiful even to profusion where the interest of the navy was concerned. It had been represented to them while Danby was minister, that many of the vessels in the royal fleet were old and unfit for sea; and, although the house was at that time in no giving mood, an aid of near six hundred thousand pounds had been granted for the building of thirty new men-of-war.

But the liberality of the nation had been made fruitless by the vices of the government. The list of the king's ships, it is true, looked well. There were nine first-rates, fourteen second-rates, thirty-nine third-rates, and many smaller vessels. The first. rates, indeed, were less than the third-rates of our time; and the third-rates would not now rank as very large frigates. This force, however, if it had been efficient, would in those days have been regarded by the greatest potentate as formidable. But it existed only on paper. When the reign of Charles terminated, his navy had sunk into degradation and decay, such as would be almost incredible if it were not certified to us by the independent and concurring evidence of witnesses whose authority is beyond exception. Pepys, the ablest man in the English admiralty, drew up, in the year 1684, a memorial on the state of his department, for the information of Charles. A few months later Bonrepaux, the ablest man in the French admiralty, having visited England for the especial purpose of ascertaining her maritime strength, laid the result of his inquiries before Louis. The two reports are to the same effect. Bonrepaux declared that he found everything in disorder and in miserable condition, that the superiority of the French marine was acknowledged with shame and envy at Whitehall, and that the state of our shipping and dockyards was of itself a sufficient guarantee that we should not meddle in the disputes of Europe. Pepys informed his master that the naval administration was a prodigy of wastefulness, corruption, ignorance, and indolence; that no estimate could be trusted, that no contract was performed, that no check was enforced. The vessels which the recent liberality of parliament had enabled the government to build, and which had never been out of harbour, had been made of such wretched timber that they were more unfit to go to sea than the old hulls which had been battered thirty years before by Dutch and Spanish

broadsides. Some of the new men-of-war, indeed, were so rotten that, unless speedily repaired, they would go down at their moorings. The sailors were paid with so little punctuality that they were glad to find some usurer who would purchase their tickets at forty per cent. discount. The commanders who had not powerful friends at court were even worse treated. Some officers, to whom large arrears were due, after vainly importuning the government during many years, had died for want of a morsel of bread.

Most of the ships which were afloat were commanded by men who had not been bred to the sea. This, it is true, was not an abuse introduced by the government of Charles. No state, ancient or modern, had before that time made a complete separation between the naval and military services. In the great civilized nations of the old world, Cimon and Lysander, Pompey and Agrippa, had fought battles by sea as well as by land. Nor had the impulse which nautical science received at the close of the fifteenth century produced any material improvement in the division of labour. At Flodden the right wing of the victorious army was led by the admiral of England. At Jarnac and Moncontour the Huguenot ranks were marshalled by the Admiral of France. Neither John of Austria, the conqueror of Lepanto, nor Lord Howard of Effingham, to whose direction the marine of England was entrusted when the Spanish invaders were approaching our shores, had received the education of a sailor. Raleigh, highly celebrated as a naval commander, had served during many years as a soldier in France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. Blake had distinguished himself by his skilful and valiant defence of an inland town before he humbled the pride of Holland and of Castile on the ocean. Since the Restoration, the same system had been followed. Great fleets had been entrusted to Rupert and Monk; Rupert, who was renowned chiefly as a hot and daring cavalry officer, and Monk, who, when he wanted his ship to tack to larboard, moved the mirth of his crew by calling out" Wheel to the left!"

But about this time wise men began to perceive that the rapid improvement, both of the art of war and of the art of navigation, made it necessary to draw a line between two professions which had hitherto been confounded. Either the command of a regiment or the command of a ship was now a matter quite sufficient to occupy the attention of a single mind. In the year 1672 the French government determined to educate young men of good family from a very early age specially for the sea service. But the English government, instead of following this excellent example, not only continued to distribute high naval commands

among landsmen, but selected for such commands landsmen who, even on land, could not safely have been put in any important trust. Any lad of noble birth, any dissolute courtier for whom one of the king's mistresses would speak a word, might hope that a ship of the line, and with it the honour of the country and the lives of hundreds of brave men, would be committed to his care. It mattered not that he had never in his life taken a voyage except on the Thames; that he could not keep his feet in a breeze; that he did not know the difference between latitude and longitude. No previous training was thought necessary, or at most he was sent to make a short trip in a man-of-war, where he was subjected to no discipline, where he was treated with marked respect, and where he lived in a round of revels and amusements. If in the intervals of feasting, drinking, and gambling, he succeeded in learning the meaning of a few technical phrases and the names of the points of the compass, he was fully qualified to take charge of a three-decker.

This is no imaginary description. In 1666, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, at seventeen years of age, volunteered to serve at sea against the Dutch. He passed six weeks on board, diverting himself, as well as he could, in the society of some young libertines of rank, and then returned home to take the command of a troop of horse. After this he was never on the water till the year 1672, when he again joined the fleet, and was almost immediately appointed captain of a ship of eighty-four guns, reputed the finest in the navy. He was then twenty-three years old, and had not, in the whole course of his life, been three months afloat. As soon as he came back from sea he was made colonel of a regiment of foot. This is a specimen of the manner in which naval commands of the highest importance were then given; and a favourable specimen: for Mulgrave, though he wanted experience, wanted neither parts nor courage. were promoted in the same way who not only were not good officers, but who were intellectually and morally incapable of ever becoming good officers, and whose only recommendation was that they had been ruined by folly and vice.

Others

The chief bait which allured these men into the service was the profit of conveying bullion and other valuable commodities from port to port; for both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were then so much infested by pirates from Barbary, that merchants were not willing to trust precious cargoes to any custody but that of a man-of-war. A captain in this way sometimes cleared several thousands of pounds by a short voyage, and for this lucrative business he too often neglected the interests of his country and the honour of his flag, made mean submissions

to foreign powers, disobeyed the most direct injunctions of his superiors, lay in port when he was ordered to chase a Sallee rover, or ran with dollars to Leghorn when his instructions directed him to repair to Lisbon. And all this he did with impunity. The same interest which had placed him in a post for which he was unfit, maintained him there. No admiral, bearded by these corrupt and dissolute minions of the palace, dared to do more than mutter something about a court martial. If any officer showed a higher sense of duty than his fellows, he soon found he lost money without acquiring honour. One captain, who, by strictly obeying the orders of the admiralty, missed a cargo which would have been worth four thousand pounds to him, was told by Charles, with ignoble levity, that he was a great fool for his pains.

The discipline of the navy was of a piece throughout. As the courtly captain despised the admiralty, he was in turn despised by his crew. It could not be concealed that he was inferior in seamanship to every foremast-man on board. It was idle to expect that old sailors, familiar with the hurricanes of the tropics and with the icebergs of the Arctic Circle, would pay prompt and respectful obedience to a chief who knew no more of winds and waves than could be learned in a gilded barge between Whitehall Stairs and Hampton Court. To trust such a novice with the working of a ship was evidently impossible.

The direction of the navigation was therefore taken from the captain and given to the master, but this partition of authority produced innumerable inconveniences. The line of demarcation was not, and perhaps could not be drawn with precision. There was therefore constant wrangling. The captain, confident in proportion to his ignorance, treated the master with lordly contempt. The master, well aware of the danger of disobliging the powerful, too often, after a struggle, yielded against his better judgment; and it was well if the loss of ship and crew was not the consequence. In general the least mischievous of the aristocratical captains were those who completely abandoned to others the direction of their vessels, and thought only of making money and spending it. The way in which these men lived was so ostentatious and voluptuous, that, greedy as they were of gain, they seldom became rich. They dressed as if for a gala at Versailles, ate off plate, drank the richest wines, and kept harems on board, while hunger and scurvy raged among the crew, and while corpses were daily flung out of the portholes.

Such was the ordinary character of those who were then called gentlemen captains. Mingled with them were to be found, happily for our country, naval commanders of a very different description,