than any other teaching to influence
contemporaries, and so to promote professional development, it is
probably true that, as a matter of historical illustration, the advance
of the eighteenth century in naval warfare is more clearly shown by two
great failures, for neither of which were these officers responsible,
and in one only of which in fact did either appear, even in a
subordinate capacity. The now nearly forgotten miscarriage of Admiral
Mathews off Toulon, in 1744, and the miserable incompetency of Byng, at
Minorca, in 1756, remembered chiefly because of the consequent execution
of the admiral, serve at least, historically, to mark the low extreme to
which had then sunk professional theory and practice--for both were
there involved. It is, however, not only as a point of departure from
which to estimate progress that these battles--if they deserve the
name--are historically useful. Considered as the plane to which
exertion, once well directed and virile, had gradually declined through
the prevalence of false ideals, they link the seventeenth century to the
eighteenth, even as the thought and action--the theory and practice--of
Hawke and Rodney uplifted the navy from the inefficiency of Mathews and
Byng to the crowning glories of the Nile and Trafalgar, with which the
nineteenth century opened. It is thus, as the very bottom of the wave,
that those singular and signal failures have their own distinctive
significance in the undulations of the onward movement. On the one hand
they are not unaccountable, as though they, any more than the Nile and
Trafalgar, were without antecedent of cause; and on the other they
serve, as a background at least, to bring out the figures of the two
admirals now before us, and to define their true historical import, as
agents and as exponents, in the changes of their day.

It is, therefore, important to the comprehension of the changes effected
in that period of transition, for which Hawke and Rodney stand, to
recognize the distinctive lesson of each of these two abortive actions,
which together may be said to fix the zero of the scale by which the
progress of the eighteenth century is denoted. They have a relation to
the past as well as to the future, standing far below the level of the
one and of the other, through causes that can be assigned. Naval warfare
in the past, in its origin and through long ages, had been waged with
vessels moved by oars, which consequently, when conditions