ce at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most
forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were: "I am
tired. Give my love to your wife and child." When I stopped at the door
for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was
staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that
glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.

Those who have read his little tale, "Horses," and the story, "The Open
Boat," in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he
loved horses and the sea. And his passage on this earth was like that of
a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and
without sunshine.

TALES OF THE SEA--1898

It is by his irresistible power to reach the adventurous side in the
character, not only of his own, but of all nations, that Marryat is
largely human. He is the enslaver of youth, not by the literary
artifices of presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own
temperament. To his young heroes the beginning of life is a splendid and
warlike lark, ending at last in inheritance and marriage. His novels are
not the outcome of his art, but of his character, like the deeds that
make up his record of naval service. To the artist his work is
interesting as a completely successful expression of an unartistic
nature. It is absolutely amazing to us, as the disclosure of the spirit
animating the stirring time when the nineteenth century was young. There
is an air of fable about it. Its loss would be irreparable, like the
curtailment of national story or the loss of an historical document. It
is the beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition.

To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. It was a stage,
where was displayed an exhibition of valour, and of such achievement as
the world had never seen before. The greatness of that achievement
cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has affected the
destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its grandeur it has all the
remoteness of an ideal. History preserves the skeleton of facts and,
here and there, a figure or a name; but it is in Marryat's novels that we
find the mass of the nameless, that we see them in the flesh, that we
obtain a glimpse of the everyday life and an insight into the spirit
animating the crowd of obscure men who knew how to build for their
country such a shining monume