Nine-tenths of these distinguished
admirals, for instance, if their faces tell truth, must needs have been
blockheads, and might have served better, one would imagine, as wooden
figureheads for their own ships than to direct any difficult and
intricate scheme of action from the quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether
the same kind of men will hereafter meet with a similar degree of
success; for they were victorious chiefly through the old English
hardihood, exercised in a field of which modern science had not yet got
possession. Rough valor has lost something of its value, since their
days, and must continue to sink lower and lower in the comparative
estimate of warlike qualities. In the next naval war, as between England
and France, I would bet, methinks, upon the Frenchman's head.
It is remarkable, however, that the great naval hero of England--the
greatest, therefore, in the world, and of all time--had none of the
stolid characteristics that belong to his class, and cannot fairly
be accepted as their representative man. Foremost in the roughest of
professions, he was as delicately organized as a woman, and as painfully
sensitive as a poet. More than any other Englishman he won the love
and admiration of his country, but won them through the efficacy of
qualities that are not English, or, at all events, were intensified in
his case and made poignant and powerful by something morbid in the man,
which put him otherwise at cross-purposes with life.
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