And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies 
himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful 
view expressed in this essay.  He, as a living man, has some 
to help, some to love, some to correct; it may be, some to 
punish.  These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon the 
man himself.  It is he, not another, who is one woman's son 
and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father.  That 
life which began so small, has now grown, with a myriad 
filaments, into the lives of others.  It is not indispensable; 
another will take the place and shoulder the discharged 
responsibility; but the better the man and the nobler his 
purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction 
of his powers and the deletion of his personality.  To have 
lived a generation, is not only to have grown at home in that 
perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties.  To 
die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base, 
something of the air of a betrayal.  A man does not only 
reflect upon what he might have done in a future that is never 
to be his; but beholding himself so early a deserter from the 
fight, he eats his heart for the good he might have done 
already.  To have been so useless and now to lose all hope of 
being useful any more - there it is that death and memory 
assail him.  And even if mankind shall go on, founding heroic 
cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily from 
strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his 
friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how 
shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which 
was his only business in this world, which was so fitfully 
pursued, and which is now so ineffectively to end?



CHAPTER V - AES TRIPLEX



THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp 
and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their 
consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, 
and has no parallel upon earth.  It outdoes all other 
accidents because it is the last of them.  Sometimes it leaps 
suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a 
regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of 
years.  And when the business is done, there is sore havoc 
made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which 
many subsidiary friendships hung together.  There are empty 
chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night.  Again, in 
taking away our friends, death does not take them away 
utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon 
intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed.  Hence 
a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, 
from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of 
mediaeval Europe.  The poorest persons have a bit of pageant 
going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the 
least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of 
respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we 
must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and 
the hired undertaker parades before the door.  All this, and 
much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of 
poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in 
many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down 
with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the 
bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, 
have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in 
practice.

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of 
with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few 
have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances.  
We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the 
side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous 
neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by 
the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving 
gardens in the greenest corner of England.  There are 
serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles 
overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the 
bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin 
may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his 
merry-making in the dust.  In the eyes of very young people, 
and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably 
reckless and desperate in such a picture.  It seems not 
credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, 
should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long 
distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell of 
high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a 
catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly 
be relished in such circumstances without something like a 
defiance of the Creator.  It should be a place for nobody but 
hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils 
drowning care in a perpetual carouse.

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the 
situation of these South American citizens forms only a very 
pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind.  This world 
itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space, 
among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in 
contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would 
set it into explosion like a penny squib.  And what, 
pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its 
organs, but a mere bagful of petards?  The least of these is 
as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powder-
magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and 
every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in 
peril.  If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend 
we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened 
as they make out we are, for the subversive accident that ends 
it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would 
follow them into battle - the blue-peter might fly at the 
truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship?  Think (if 
these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of 
spirit we should affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: 
a deadlier spot than any battle-field in history, where the 
far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left 
their bones!  What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so 
much more dangerous than the wildest sea?  And what would it 
be to grow old?  For, after a certain distance, every step we 
take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, 
and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries 
going through.  By the time a man gets well into the 
seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle, and when 
he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an 
overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.  Do 
the old men mind it, as a matter of fact?  Why, no.  They were 
never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the 
raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their 
own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, 
but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some 
one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a 
guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so 
much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and 
they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age 
compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and 
peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.  It may fairly 
be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a 
much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, 
than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and 
clamber into bed.

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with 
what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley 
of the Shadow of Death.  The whole way is one wilderness of 
snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch, 
is irrevocable ruin.  And yet we go spinning through it all, 
like a party for the Derby.  Perhaps the reader remembers one 
of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he 
encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge 
over Baiae bay; and when they were in the height of their 
enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the 
company, and had them tossed into the sea.  This is no bad 
miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race 
of man.  Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even 
while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed 
by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us over in the 
end!

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork 
of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the 
instant.  Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in 
the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should 
think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the 
devouring earthquake?  The love of Life and the fear of Death 
are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more 
we think about them.  It is a well-known fact that an immense 
proportion of boat accidents would never happen if people held 
the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet, 
unless it be some martinet of a professional mariner or some 
landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures 
makes it fast.  A strange instance of man's unconcern and 
brazen boldness in the face of death!

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we 
import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness.  We have 
no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and 
some of its consequences to others; and although we have some 
experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has 
flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess 
at the meaning of the word LIFE.  All literature, from Job and 
Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an 
attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of 
view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of 
living to the Definition of Life.  And our sages give us about 
the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is 
a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with 
dreams.  Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the 
same work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged 
over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon 
another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy 
has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her 
contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent 
Possibility of Sensation.  Truly a fine result!  A man may 
very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, 
surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation!  He may be 
afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a 
club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly of 
abstract death.  We may trick with the word life in its dozen 
senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms 
of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true 
throughout - that we do not love life, in the sense that we 
are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do 
not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living.  Into 
the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of 
providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing 
hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, 
good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-
approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to 
anything like a general view of life's possibilities and 
issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all 
the most scrupulous of their personal safety.  To be deeply 
interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly 
the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to 
disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw.  For 
surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber 
roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff 
fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a 
measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon 
both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the 
dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be 
hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the 
tomb as if it were a world too far away.  Both sides must feel 
a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they 
draw in their chairs to dinner.  Indeed, a good meal and a 
bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the 
question.  When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets 
a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of 
contemplation.  Death may be knocking at the door, like the 
Commander's statue; we have something else in hand, thank God, 
and let him knock.  Passing bells are ringing all the world 
over.  All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting 
company with all his aches and ecstasies.  For us also the 
trap is laid.  But we are so fond of life that we have no 
leisure to entertain the terror of death.  It is a honeymoon 
with us all through, and none of the longest.  Small blame to 
us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, 
to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the 
mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of 
our own nimble bodies.

We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring 
about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head is 
generally very bald, and his senses very dull, before he comes 
to that.  Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead 
wall - a mere bag's end, as the French say - or whether we 
think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our 
turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; 
whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic 
poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look 
justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount 
into a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and 
all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion 
possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing 
terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single 
mind.  No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache 
and terror from the thought of death than our respected 
lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his 
conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh 
and lively vein he spoke of life.  Already an old man, he 
ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with 
triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual 
cups of tea.  As courage and intelligence are the two 
qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the 
first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate 
in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all 
abashed before the fact.  A frank and somewhat headlong 
carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in 
maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well 
armoured for this world.

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend 
and a good citizen to boot.  We do not go to cowards for 
tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man 
who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to 
consider others.  That eminent chemist who took his walks 
abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had 
all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his 
own digestion.  So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in 
the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression 
in a paralysis of generous acts.  The victim begins to shrink 
spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated 
temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin 
shoes and tepid milk.  The care of one important body or soul 
becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world 
begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the 
regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equably forward 
over blood and rain.  To be overwise is to ossify; and the 
scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.  Now the man who 
has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock 
of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly 
used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different 
acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and 
fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running 
towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and 
become a constellation in the end.  Lord look after his 
health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at 
the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and 
peril towards his aim.  Death is on all sides of him with 
pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; 
unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends and 
relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal 
synod about his path: and what cares he for all this?  Being a 
true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and 
spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in 
any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace 
until he touch the goal.  "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" 
cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are 
great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain 
satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some 
sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation 
tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the 
stumbling-blocks of prudence.  Think of the heroism of 
Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal 
limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him 
through triumphantly until the end!  Who, if he were wisely 
considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any 
work much more considerable than a halfpenny post card?  Who 
would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had 
each fallen in mid-course?  Who would find heart enough to 
begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this 
is!  To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a 
regulated temperature - as if that were not to die a hundred 
times over, and for ten years at a stretch!  As if it were not 
to die in one's own lifetime, and without even the sad 
immunities of death!  As if it were not to die, and yet be the 
patient spectators of our own pitiable change!  The Permanent 
Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at 
arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark 
chamber.  It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than 
to waste it like a miser.  It is better to live and be done 
with it, than to die daily in the sickroom.  By all means 
begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, 
even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and 
see what can be accomplished in a week.  It is not only in 
finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour.  
A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which out-
lives the most untimely ending.  All who have meant good work 
with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they 
may die before they have the time to sign it.  Every heart 
that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse 
behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.  
And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in 
mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous 
foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of 
boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and 
silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a 
termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, 
foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably 
straggling to an end in sandy deltas?  When the Greeks made 
their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I 
cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in 
their eye.  For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, 
this is to die young.  Death has not been suffered to take so 
much as an illusion from his heart.  In the hot-fit of life, 
a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound 
on to the other side.  The noise of the mallet and chisel is 
scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, 
trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-
blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.



CHAPTER VI - EL DORADO



IT seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world 
where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, and 
where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great 
gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally and 
irretrievably into the bag which contains us.  And it would 
seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as 
possible was the one goal of man's contentious life.  And yet, 
as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance.  We live in an 
ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to 
another in an endless series.  There is always a new horizon 
for onward-looking men, and although we dwell on a small 
planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a 
brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes 
are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is 
prolonged until the term of life.  To be truly happy is a 
question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we 
want and not of what we have.  An aspiration is a joy for 
ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune 
which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a 
revenue of pleasurable activity.  To have many of these is to 
be spiritually rich.  Life is only a very dull and ill-
directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; 
and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a 
mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may 
very well break their shins.  It is in virtue of his own 
desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with 
even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and 
people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed 
appetite for work and pleasure.  Desire and curiosity are the 
two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted 
colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils 
interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to 
beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in 
the possibilities of pleasure.  Suppose he could take one meal 
so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any 
more; suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of 
the world and allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him to 
do the like in any province of experience - would not that man 
be in a poor way for amusement ever after?

One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his 
knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, 
and often laying the book down to contemplate the landscape or 
the prints in the inn parlour; for he fears to come to an end 
of his entertainment, and be left companionless on the last 
stages of his journey.  A young fellow recently finished the 
works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright, 
with the ten note-books upon Frederick the Great.  "What!" 
cried the young fellow, in consternation, "is there no more 
Carlyle?  Am I left to the daily papers?"  A more celebrated 
instance is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly because he 
had no more worlds to subdue.  And when Gibbon had finished 
the DECLINE AND FALL, he had only a few moments of joy; and it 
was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.

Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; 
our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end 
of nothing here below.  Interests are only plucked up to sow 
themselves again, like mustard.  You would think, when the 
child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it 
is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have 
seen it through its teething and its education, and at last 
its marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new 
quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the health of 
your children's children grows as touching a concern as that 
of your own.  Again, when you have married your wife, you 
would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go 
downward by an easy slope.  But you have only ended courting 
to begin marriage.  Falling in love and winning love are often 
difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to 
keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which 
both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill.  The true 
love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the 
married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and 
generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable 
ideal.  Unattainable?  Ay, surely unattainable, from the very 
fact that they are two instead of one.

"Of making books there is no end," complained the 
Preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising 
letters as an occupation.  There is no end, indeed, to making 
books or experiments, or to travel, or to gathering wealth.  
Problem gives rise to problem.  We may study for ever, and we 
are never as learned as we would.  We have never made a statue 
worthy of our dreams.  And when we have discovered a 
continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find 
another ocean or another plain upon the further side.  In the 
infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence and 
to spare.  It is not like the works of Carlyle, which can be 
read to an end.  Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or 
in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather and the 
seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there 
for a lifetime there will be always something new to startle 
and delight us.

There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one 
thing that can be perfectly attained: Death.  And from a 
variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it 
be worth attaining.

A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras, 
ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest; 
indefatigable, adventurous pioneers.  It is true that we shall 
never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there 
is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were 
endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not 
much nearer what we wanted at the end.  O toiling hands of 
mortals!  O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither!  
Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some 
conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the 
setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye 
know your own blessednes; for to travel hopefully is a better 
thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.



CHAPTER VII - THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS



"Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am 
sure it is so in States to honour them." - SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.


THERE is one story of the wars of Rome which I have 
always very much envied for England.  Germanicus was going 
down at the head of the legions into a dangerous river - on 
the opposite bank the woods were full of Germans - when there 
flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal the Romans 
on their way; they did not pause or waver, but disappeared 
into the forest where the enemy lay concealed.  "Forward!" 
cried Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration, 
"Forward! and follow the Roman birds."  It would be a very 
heavy spirit that did not give a leap at such a signal, and a 
very timorous one that continued to have any doubt of success.  
To appropriate the eagles as fellow-countrymen was to make 
imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and 
its military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of 
those individual Roman legionaries now fording a river in 
Germany, looked altogether greater and more hopeful.  It is a 
kind of illusion easy to produce.  A particular shape of 
cloud, the appearance of a particular star, the holiday of 
some particular saint, anything in short to remind the 
combatants of patriotic legends or old successes, may be 
enough to change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives 
to the one party a feeling that Right and the larger interests 
are with them.

If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must 
be about the sea.  The lion is nothing to us; he has not been 
taken to the hearts of the people, and naturalised as an 
English emblem.  We know right well that a lion would fall 
foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian 
Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of battle.  
But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene 
of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in 
lyrical strains to claim it as our own.  The prostrating 
experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always 
an agreeable side to English prepossessions.  A man from 
Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the ship from the 
other until she begins to move, swaggers among such persons 
with a sense of hereditary nautical experience.  To suppose 
yourself endowed with natural parts for the sea because you 
are the countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just 
as unwarrantable as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient 
guarantee that you will look well 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 any one'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 deck in the sharp sea air put a man on his mettle 
again; a battle must have been a capital relief; and prize-
money, bloodily earned and grossly squandered, opened the 
doors of the prison for a twinkling.  Somehow or other, at 
least, this worst of possible lives could not overlie the 
spirit and gaiety of our sailors; they did their duty as 
though they had some interest in the fortune of that country 
which so cruelly oppressed them, they served their guns 
merrily when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest 
ear for a bold, honourable sentiment, of any class of men the 
world ever produced.

Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names.  Pym 
and Habakkuk may do pretty well, but they must not think to 
cope with the Cromwells and Isaiahs.  And you could not find a 
better case in point than that of the English Admirals.  Drake 
and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men of execution.  
Frobisher, Rodney, Boscawen, Foul-Weather, Jack Byron, are all 
good to catch the eye in a page of a naval history.  
Cloudesley Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding 
syllables.  Benbow has a bulldog quality that suits the man's 
character, and it takes us back to those English archers who 
were his true comrades for plainness, tenacity, and pluck.  
Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an act of bold 
conduct in the field.  It is impossible to judge of Blake or 
Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of such 
heroes.  But still it is odd enough, and very appropriate in 
this connection, that the latter was greatly taken with his 
Sicilian title.  "The signification, perhaps, pleased him," 
says Southey; "Duke of Thunder was what in Dahomey would have 
been called a STRONG NAME; it was to a sailor's taste, and 
certainly to no man could it be more applicable."  Admiral in 
itself is one of the most satisfactory of distinctions; it has 
a noble sound and a very proud history; and Columbus thought 
so highly of it, that he enjoined his heirs to sign themselves 
by that title as long as the house should last.

But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names, 
that I wish to speak about in this paper.  That spirit is 
truly English; they, and not Tennyson's cotton-spinners or Mr. 
D'Arcy Thompson's Abstract Bagman, are the true and typical 
Englishmen.  There may be more HEAD of bagmen in the country, 
but human beings are reckoned by number only in political 
constitutions.  And the Admirals are typical in the full force 
of the word.  They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, 
but of a virtue in which most Englishmen can claim a moderate 
share; and what we admire in their lives is a sort of 
apotheosis of ourselves.  Almost everybody in our land, except 
humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been depressed 
by exceptionally aesthetic surroundings, can understand and 
sympathise with an Admiral or a prize-fighter.  I do not wish 
to bracket Benbow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are 
practically bracketed for admiration in the minds of many 
frequenters of ale-houses.  If you told them about Germanicus 
and the eagles, or Regulus going back to Carthage, they would 
very likely fall asleep; but tell them about Harry Pearce and 
Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and they put down 
their pipes to listen.  I have by me a copy of BOXIANA, on the 
fly-leaves of which a youthful member of the fancy kept a 
chronicle of remarkable events and an obituary of great men.  
Here we find piously chronicled the demise of jockeys, 
watermen, and pugilists - Johnny Moore, of the Liverpool Prize 
Ring; Tom Spring, aged fifty-six; "Pierce Egan, senior, writer 
OF BOXIANA and other sporting works" - and among all these, 
the Duke of Wellington!  If Benbow had lived in the time of 
this annalist, do you suppose his name would not have been 
added to the glorious roll?  In short, we do not all feel 
warmly towards Wesley or Laud, we cannot all take pleasure in 
PARADISE LOST; but there are certain common sentiments and 
touches of nature by which the whole nation is made to feel 
kinship.  A little while ago everybody, from Hazlitt and John 
Wilson down to the imbecile creature who scribbled his 
register on the fly-leaves of BOXIANA, felt a more or less 
shamefaced satisfaction in the exploits of prize-fighters.  
And the exploits of the Admirals are popular to the same 
degree, and tell in all ranks of society.  Their sayings and 
doings stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if 
the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the outward 
and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we 
should still leave behind us a durable monument of what we 
were in these sayings and doings of the English Admirals.

Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the 
VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, heard that the whole 
Dutch fleet was putting to sea.  He told Captain Hotham to 
anchor alongside of him in the narrowest part of the channel, 
and fight his vessel till she sank.  "I have taken the depth 
of the water," added he, "and when the VENERABLE goes down, my 
flag will still fly."  And you observe this is no naked Viking 
in a prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of Parliament, 
with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat 
of great size, and flannel underclothing.  In the same spirit, 
Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours flying; so that even 
if five were shot away, it should not be imagined he had 
struck.  He too must needs wear his four stars outside his 
Admiral's frock, to be a butt for sharp-shooters.  "In honour 
I gained them," he said to objectors, adding with sublime 
illogicality, "in honour I will die with them."  Captain 
Douglas of the ROYAL OAK, when the Dutch fired his vessel in 
the Thames, sent his men ashore, but was burned along with her 
himself rather than desert his post without orders.  Just 
then, perhaps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth round the 
supper-table with the ladies of his court.  When Raleigh 
sailed into Cadiz, and all the forts and ships opened fire on 
him at once, he scorned to shoot a gun, and made answer with a 
flourish of insulting trumpets.  I like this bravado better 
than the wisest dispositions to insure victory; it comes from 
the heart and goes to it.  God has made nobler heroes, but he 
never made a finer gentleman than Walter Raleigh.  And as our 
Admirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a 
strutting and vainglorious style of fight, so they discovered 
a startling eagerness for battle, and courted war like a 
mistress.  When the news came to Essex before Cadiz that the 
attack had been decided, he threw his hat into the sea.  It is 
in this way that a schoolboy hears of a half-holiday; but this 
was a bearded man of great possessions who had just been 
allowed to risk his life.  Benbow could not lie still in his 
bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on deck in a basket 
to direct and animate the fight.  I said they loved war like a 
mistress; yet I think there are not many mistresses we should 
continue to woo under similar circumstances.  Trowbridge went 
ashore with the CULLODEN, and was able to take no part in the 
battle of the Nile.  "The merits of that ship and her gallant 
captain," wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, "are too well known 
to benefit by anything I could say.  Her misfortune was great 
in getting aground, WHILE HER MORE FORTUNATE COMPANIONS WERE 
IN THE FULL TIDE OF HAPPINESS."  This is a notable expression, 
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 in 
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 wineglasses, 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.  Thence-forward, 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 fifty sail 
had been mauling them for fifteen hours, the ADMIRAL OF THE 
HULKS and the ASCENSION of Seville had both gone down 
alongside, and two other vessels had taken refuge on shore in 
a sinking state.  In Hawke's words, they had "taken a great 
deal of drubbing."  The captain and crew thought they had done 
about enough; but Greenville was not of this opinion; he gave 
orders to the master gunner, whom he knew to be a fellow after 
his own stamp, to scuttle the REVENGE where she lay.  The 
others, who were not mortally wounded like the Admiral, 
interfered with some decision, locked the master gunner in his 
cabin, after having deprived him of his sword, for he 
manifested an intention to kill himself if he were not to sink 
the ship; and sent to the Spaniards to demand terms.  These 
were granted.  The second or third day after, Greenville died 
of his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship, leaving his 
contempt upon the "traitors and dogs" who had not chosen to do 
as he did, and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully 
manned, with six inferior craft ravaged by sickness and short 
of stores.  He at least, he said, had done his duty as he was 
bound to do, and looked for everlasting fame.

Some one said to me the other day that they considered 
this story to be of a pestilent example.  I am not inclined to 
imagine we shall ever be put into any practical difficulty 
from a superfluity of Greenvilles.  And besides, I demur to 
the opinion.  The worth of such actions is not a thing to be 
decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous 
commonsense.  The man who wished to make the ballads of his 
country, coveted a small matter compared to what Richard 
Greenville accomplished.  I wonder how many people have been 
inspired by this mad story, and how many battles have been 
actually won for England in the spirit thus engendered.  It is 
only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you can be 
sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable 
occasion.  An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic 
fancies, will not be led far by terror of the Provost Marshal.  
Even German warfare, in addition to maps and telegraphs, is 
not above employing the WACHT AM RHEIN.  Nor is it only in the 
profession of arms that such stories may do good to a man.  In 
this desperate and gleeful fighting, whether it is Greenville 
or Benbow, Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in the ship, 
we see men brought to the test and giving proof of what we 
call heroic feeling.  Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my 
club smoking-room, that they are a prey to prodigious heroic 
feelings, and that it costs them more nobility of soul to do 
nothing in particular, than would carry on all the wars, by 
sea or land, of bellicose humanity.  It may very well be so, 
and yet not touch the point in question.  For what I desire is 
to see some of this nobility brought face to face with me in 
an inspiriting achievement.  A man may talk smoothly over a 
cigar in my club smoking-room from now to the Day of Judgment, 
without adding anything to mankind's treasury of illustrious 
and encouraging examples.  It is not over the virtues of a 
curate-and-tea-party novel, that people are abashed into high 
resolutions.  It may be because their hearts are crass, but to 
stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with 
some pomp and circumstance.  And that is why these stories of 
our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full 
of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than 
any material benefit in all the books of political economy 
between Westminster and Birmingham.  Greenville chewing 
wineglasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more 
than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in the 
body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his 
finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it 
ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go into 
battle, but send back merchant clerks with more heart and 
spirit to their book-keeping by double entry.

There is another question which seems bound up in this; 
and that is Temple's problem: whether it was wise of Douglas 
to burn with the ROYAL OAK? and by implication, what it was 
that made him do so?  Many will tell you it was the desire of 
fame.

"To what do Caesar and Alexander owe the infinite 
grandeur of their renown, but to fortune?  How many men has 
she extinguished in the beginning of their progress, of whom 
we have no knowledge; who brought as much courage to the work 
as they, if their adverse hap had not cut them off in the 
first sally of their arms?  Amongst so many and so great 
dangers, I do not remember to have anywhere read that Caesar 
was ever wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than 
the least of these he went through.  A great many brave 
actions must be expected to be performed without witness, for 
one that comes to some notice.  A man is not always at the top 
of a breach, or at the head of an army in the sight of his 
general, as upon a platform.  He is often surprised between 
the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard of his life 
against a henroost; he must dislodge four rascally musketeers 
out of a barn; he must prick out single from his party, as 
necessity arises, and meet adventures alone."

Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay on GLORY.  
Where death is certain, as in the cases of Douglas or 
Greenville, it seems all one from a personal point of view.  
The man who lost his life against a henroost, is in the same 
pickle with him who lost his life against a fortified place of 
the first order.  Whether he has missed a peerage or only the 
corporal's stripes, it is all one if he has missed them and is 
quietly in the grave.  It was by a hazard that we learned the 
conduct of the four marines of the WAGER.  There was no room 
for these brave fellows in the boat, and they were left behind 
upon the island to a certain death.  They were soldiers, they 
said, and knew well enough it was their business to die; and 
as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave 
three cheers, and cried "God bless the king!"  Now, one or two 
of those who were in the boat escaped, against all likelihood, 
to tell the story.  That was a great thing for us; but surely 
it cannot, by any possible twisting of human speech, be 
construed into anything great for the marines.  You may 
suppose, if you like, that they died hoping their behaviour 
would not be forgotten; or you may suppose they thought 
nothing on the subject, which is much more likely.  What can 
be the signification of the word "fame" to a private of 
marines, who cannot read and knows nothing of past history 
beyond the reminiscences of his grandmother?  But whichever 
supposition you make, the fact is unchanged.  They died while 
the question still hung in the balance; and I suppose their 
bones were already white, before the winds and the waves and 
the humour of Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had decided 
whether they were to be unknown and useless martyrs or 
honoured heroes.  Indeed, I believe this is the lesson: if it 
is for fame that men do brave actions, they are only silly 
fellows after all.

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to 
decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain 
heroism away.  The Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral 
at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat of 
admiration.  But there is another theory of the personal 
motive in these fine sayings and doings, which I believe to be 
true and wholesome.  People usually do things, and suffer 
martyrdoms, because they have an inclination that way.  The 
best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but 
the one who loves the practice of his art.  And instead of 
having a taste for being successful merchants and retiring at 
thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we call 
heroic forms of excitement.  If the Admirals courted war like 
a mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came 
gaily out of the forecastle, - it is because a fight is a 
period of multiplied and intense experiences, and, by Nelson's 
computation, worth "thousands" to any one who has a heart 
under his jacket.  If the marines of the WAGER gave three 
cheers and cried "God bless the king," it was because they 
liked to do things nobly for their own satisfaction.  They 
were giving their lives, there was no help for that; and they 
made it a point of self-respect to give them handsomely.  And 
there were never four happier marines in God's world than 
these four at that moment.  If it was worth thousands to be at 
the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arithmetician would calculate 
how much it was worth to be one of these four marines; or how 
much their story is worth to each of us who read it.  And mark 
you, undemonstrative men would have spoiled the situation.  
The finest action is the better for a piece of purple.  If the 
soldiers of the BIRKENHEAD had not gone down in line, or these 
marines of the WAGER had walked away simply into the island, 
like plenty of other brave fellows in the like circumstances, 
my Benthamite arithmetician would assign a far lower value to 
the two stories.  We have to desire a grand air in our heroes; 
and such a knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put 
the dots on their own i's, and leave us in no suspense as to 
when they mean to be heroic.  And hence, we should 
congratulate ourselves upon the fact that our Admirals were 
not only great-hearted but big-spoken.