in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated beyond the
reach of argument. We should consider ourselves unworthy of our descent
if we did not share the arrogance of our progenitors, and please
ourselves with the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is
looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we regard it
as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers
take their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other nation
has lost as many ships or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.

There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the noble, terrifying,
and picturesque conditions of some of our sea-fights. Hawke's battle in
the tempest, and Aboukir at the moment when the French Admiral blew up,
reach the limit of what is imposing to the imagination. And our naval
annals owe some of their interest to the fantastic and beautiful
appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the sea and
everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads on a half-holiday at
the coast. Nay, and what we know of the misery between-decks enhances
the bravery of what was done by giving it something for contrast. We
like to know that these bold and honest fellows contrived to live, and
to keep bold and honest, among absurd and vile surroundings. No reader
can forget the description of the _Thunder_ in "Roderick Random": the
disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of officers and men; deck after
deck, each with some new object of offence; the hospital, where the
hammocks were huddled together with but fourteen inches space for each;
the cockpit, far under water, where "in an intolerable stench" the
spectacled steward kept the accounts of the different messes; and the
canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan made flip and
salmagundi, smoked his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore his queer
Welsh imprecations. There are portions of this business on board the
_Thunder_ over which the reader passes lightly and hurriedly, like a
traveller in a malarious country. It is easy enough to understand the
opinion of Dr. Johnson: "Why, sir," he said, "no man will be a sailor
who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail." You would fancy
anyone's spirit would die out under such an accumulation of darkness,
noisomeness, and injustice, above all when he had not come there of his
own free will, but under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the press-gang.
But perhaps a watch on