e
we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man
of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly
calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought
breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which
literary pathos is poor and meaningless.

And even in the subjects which they select they are pursued by the same
curious fatality. Why is Drake to be best known, or to be only known, in
his last voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to immortalise
the failure? When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans,
and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the
southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe
with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the
antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another man from what
he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish
fighting and gold-hunting. There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we
take it as the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his
death, which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what he did.

But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is
the editor of Hawkins's 'Voyage to the South Sea.' The narrative is
striking in itself; not one of the best, but very good; and, as it is
republished complete, we can fortunately read it through, carefully
shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand, and we shall then
find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone of all the
writings of the period.

It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which did no dishonour
to him who sunk under it; and there is a melancholy dignity in the style
in which Hawkins tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of winning back his
lost laurels, he respects himself still for the heart with which he
endured a shame which would have broken a smaller man. It would have
required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to have abstained
from marring the pages with puns of which 'Punch' would be ashamed, and
with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
the nineteenth century condescends to criticise and approve of his
half-barbarous precursor. And what excuse can we find for such an
offence as t