nt of memories.

Marryat is really a writer of the Service. What sets him apart is his
fidelity. His pen serves his country as well as did his professional
skill and his renowned courage. His figures move about between water and
sky, and the water and the sky are there only to frame the deeds of the
Service. His novels, like amphibious creatures, live on the sea and
frequent the shore, where they flounder deplorably. The loves and the
hates of his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices. His
women, from the beautiful Agnes to the witch-like mother of Lieutenant
Vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors' wives, like the
shadows of what has never been. His Silvas, his Ribieras, his Shriftens,
his Delmars remind us of people we have heard of somewhere, many times,
without ever believing in their existence. His morality is honourable
and conventional. There is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in
the midst of carnage. His naiveties are perpetrated in a lurid light.
There is an endless variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with
memorable eccentricities of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in
the drawing. They do not belong to life; they belong exclusively to the
Service. And yet they live; there is a truth in them, the truth of their
time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an
unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years
of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the
rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his
sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious. His greatness
is undeniable.

It is undeniable. To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is
Marryat's navy still. He has created a priceless legend. If he be not
immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambition, because
he has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the history of that
Service on which the life of his country depends. The tradition of the
great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the
guarantee of the future. He loved his country first, the Service next,
the sea perhaps not at all. But the sea loved him without reserve. It
gave him his professional distinction and his author's fame--a fame such
as not often falls to the lot of a true artist.

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of
the sea with true artistic