to venture through the wild seas to pick off the crew of a foundering wreck,—­“when the jerking, slatting sail overhead must be got in somehow,” though topmast and yard and sail may go any minute,—­when the quailing mate or frightened captain dares not order men to all but certain death, and still less dares to lead,—­then it is, when the lives of all hang on the heroism of one, that the good blood will assert itself.

Then there is the class who are sent to sea,—­scapegraces all.  The alternative is not unfrequently the one of which Dr. Johnson chose the other side.  The Doctor being sans question a landsman, he never saw, we warrant, any resemblance to fore and main and mizzen in the three spires of Litchfield.  But the Doctor, not being a scamp, was not compelled to choose.  Many another is not so well off.  Like little boys who are sent to school, they learn what they learn from pretty much the same motive.  Sometimes they turn out good and gallant men; but not often does it reform a man who is unfit for the shore to dispatch him to sea.  If there are any vices he does not carry with him, they are commonly to be had dog- and dirt-cheap at the first port his ship makes.

Then, last of all, there is a large and increasing class who get to sea.  They fall into the calling, they cannot tell how; they continue in it, they cannot tell why.  Some have friends who would rescue them, if they could; others have no friend, no home, no nationality even, the pariahs of the sea, sullen, stupid, and broken-down, burnt-out shells of men, which the belaying-pin of some brutal or passionate mate crushes into sudden collapse, or which the hospital duly consigns to the potter’s field.

There is a popular idea of the sailor, which, beginning at the lowest note of the gamut, with the theatrical and cheap-novelist mariner, runs up its do-re-mi with authors, preachers, public speakers, reformers, and legislators, but always in the wrong key.  There is no use in making up an ideal of any class; but if you must have one, let it be of an extinct class.  It does not much harm to construct horrible plesiosaurians from the petrified scales we dig out of a coal-mine or chalk-pit; but when it comes to idealizing the sea-serpent, who winters at the Cape Verds and summers at Nahant, it is a serious matter.  For the love of Agassiz, give us true dimensions or none.

So, too, fancy Greeks and Romans may be ever preferable to the true Aristophanic or Juvenalian article,—­imaginary Cavaliers or Puritans not at all hard to swallow,—­but ideal sailors, why in the world must we bear them, when we can get the originals so cheaply?  When the American “Beggar’s Opera” was put upon the stage, “Mose” stepped forward, the very impersonation of the Bowery.  If it was low, it was at least true, a social fact.  But the stage sailor is not as near probability as even the stage ship or the theatrical ocean.  He is