was reached in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, but was
prolonged and intensified by a protracted interval of professional
apathy. Other grievous evils doubtless existed, serious defects in
administration, involving indifferent equipment, bad and scanty
provisions, inferior physique in the ships' companies, and wretched
sanitary arrangements; but while all these unquestionably gravely
affected general efficiency for war, they belonged rather to the civil
than the military side of the profession. In the hour of battle it was
not these, but the tone and efficiency of the officers, that chiefly
told. A false pattern of action had been accepted at a moment favorable
to its perpetuation, when naval warfare on the grand scale had ceased,
owing to the decline of the principal enemy, the navy of France; while
the average competency of naval officers had been much lowered through
want of professional incentive, and the absence of any sifting process
by which the unfit could be surely eliminated. That plenty of good
material existed, was sufficiently shown by the number of names,
afterwards distinguished, which soon began to appear. Weeding went on
apace; but before its work was done, there had to be traversed a painful
period, fruitful of evidences of unfitness, of personal weakness, of low
or false professional ideas.

It is with this period that we have first had to do as our point of
departure, by which not only to estimate the nature and degree of the
subsequent advance, but to illustrate also the part specifically
contributed to it by Hawke and Rodney, through their personal and
professional characteristics. While types, they are more than mere
exponents of the change as a whole, and will be found to bear to it
particular relations,--its leaders in fact, as well as in name. It is
not merely fanciful to say that Hawke stands for and embodies the spirit
of the new age, while Rodney rather exemplifies and develops the form in
which that spirit needed ultimately to cloth itself in order to perfect
its working. The one is a protest in act against the professional
faintheartedness, exaggerated into the semblance of personal timidity,
shown by the captains off Toulon in 1774; the other, in the simple but
skilful methods and combinations adopted by him, both represents and
gives effect to a reaction against the extravagant pedantry, which it
fell to Byng, in all the honesty of a thoroughly commonplace man, to
exhibit