and depicts the
whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of the English Admirals to a hair.
It was to be "in the full tide of happiness" for Nelson to destroy five
thousand five hundred and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have
his own scalp torn open by a piece of langridge shot. Hear him again at
Copenhagen: "A shot through the mainmast knocked the splinters about;
and he observed to one of his officers with a smile, 'It is warm work,
and this may be the last to any of us at any moment'; and then, stopping
short at the gangway, added, with emotion, '_But, mark you--I would not
be elsewhere for thousands._'"

I must tell one more story, which has lately been made familiar to us
all, and that in one of the noblest ballads of the English language. I
had written my tame prose abstract, I shall beg the reader to believe,
when I had no notion that the sacred bard designed an immortality for
Greenville. Sir Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas
Howard, and lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. He was
a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow apparently; and it
is related of him that he would chew and swallow wine-glasses, by way of
convivial levity, till the blood ran out of his mouth. When the Spanish
fleet of fifty sail came within sight of the English, his ship, the
_Revenge_, was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented by
the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open--either to turn her
back upon the enemy or sail through one of his squadrons. The first
alternative Greenville dismissed as dishonourable to himself, his
country, and her Majesty's ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter, and
steered into the Spanish armament. Several vessels he forced to luff and
fall under his lee; until, about three o'clock of the afternoon, a great
ship of three decks of ordnance took the wind out of his sails, and
immediately boarded. Thenceforward, and all night long, the _Revenge_
held her own single-handed against the Spaniards. As one ship was beaten
off, another took its place. She endured, according to Raleigh's
computation, "eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many
assaults and entries." By morning the powder was spent, the pikes all
broken, not a stick was standing, "nothing left overhead either for
flight or defence"; six feet of water in the hold; almost all the men
hurt, and Greenville himself in a dying condition. To bring them to this
pass, a fleet of