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XII. EXPERIENCES OF AUTHORSHIP 302

PREFACE

When I was a boy, some years before I obtained my appointment in the
navy, I spent many of those happy hours that only childhood knows
poring over the back numbers of a British service periodical, which
began its career in 1828, with the title _Colburn's United Service
Magazine_; under which name, save and except the Colburn, it still
survives. Besides weightier matters, its early issues abounded in
reminiscences by naval officers, then yet in the prime of life, who
had served through the great Napoleonic wars. More delightful still,
it had numerous nautical stories, based probably on facts, serials
under such entrancing titles as "Leaves from my Log Book," by Flexible
Grommet, Passed Midshipman; a pen-name, the nautical felicity of which
will be best appreciated by one who has had the misfortune to handle a
grommet[1] which was not flexible. Then there was "The Order Book," by
Jonathan Oldjunk; an epithet so suggestive of the waste-heap, even to
a landsman's ears, that one marvels a man ever took it unto himself,
especially in that decline of life when we are more sensitive on the
subject of bodily disabilities than once we were. Old junk, however,
can yet be "worked up," as the sea expression goes, into other uses,
and that perhaps was what Mr. Oldjunk meant; his early adventures as a
young "luff" were, for economical reasons, worked up into their
present literary shape, with the addition of a certain amount of
extraneous matter--love-making, and the like. Indeed, so far from
uselessness, that veteran seaman and rigid economist, the Earl of St.
Vincent, when First Lord of the Admiralty, had given to a specific
form of old junk--viz., "shakings"--the honors of a special order, for
the preservation thereof, the which forms the staple of a comical
anecdote in Basil Hall's _Fragments of Voyages and Travels_; itself a
superior example of the instructive "recollections," of less literary
merit, which but for Colburn's would have perished.

Any one who has attempted to write history knows what queer nuggets of
useful information lie hidden away in such papers; how they often help
to reconstruct an incident, or determine a mooted point. If the
Greeks, after the Peloponnesian war, had had a Colburn's, we should
have a more certain, if not a perfect, clew to the reconstruction of
the trireme; and probably even could