re a gun for his help.

Of Collingwood, Thackeray says, "I think, since Heaven made gentlemen, it
never made a better one than Cuthbert Collingwood," and there was, no
doubt, a knightly and chivalrous side to Collingwood worthy of King
Arthur's round table. But there was also a side of heavy-footed
common-sense, of Dutch-like frugality, in Collingwood, a sort of
wooden-headed unimaginativeness which looks humorous when set against the
background of such a planet-shaking fight as Trafalgar. Thus on the
morning of the fight he advised one of his lieutenants, who wore a pair
of boots, to follow his example and put on stockings and shoes, as, in
the event of being shot in the leg, it would, he explained, "be so much
more manageable for the surgeon." And as he walked the break of his poop
in tights, silk stockings, and buckled shoes, leading, in his single
ship, an attack on a fleet, he calmly munched an apple. To be able to
munch an apple when beginning Trafalgar is an illustration of what may be
called the quality of wooden-headed unimaginativeness in Collingwood.
And yet Collingwood had a sense of the scale of the drama in which he was
taking part. "Now, gentlemen," he said to his officers, "let us do
something to-day which the world may talk of hereafter." Collingwood, in
reality, was a great man and a great seaman, and in the battle which
followed he "fought like an angel," to quote the amusingly inappropriate
metaphor of Blackwood.

The two majestic British columns moved slowly on, the great ships, with
ports hauled up and guns run out, following each other like a procession
of giants. "I suppose," says Codrington, who commanded the _Orion_, "no
man ever before saw such a sight." And the element of humour was added
to the scene by the spectacle of the tiny _Pickle_, a duodecimo schooner,
gravely hanging on to the quarter of an 80-gun ship--as an actor in the
fight describes it--"with the boarding-nettings up, and her tompions out
of her four guns--about as large and as formidable as two pairs of
Wellington boots."

Collingwood bore down to the fight a clear quarter of a mile ahead of the
next ship. The fire of the enemy, like so many spokes of flame
converging to a centre, broke upon him. But in silence the great ship
moved ahead to a gap in the line between the _Santa Anna_, a huge black
hulk of 112 guns, and the _Neptune_, of 74. As the bowsprit of the
_Royal Sovereign_ slowly glided past the stern of th