exclusively to the Service.  And yet they live; there is a truth in them, the truth of their time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years of war and victories can give.  His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious.  His greatness is undeniable.

It is undeniable.  To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is Marryat’s navy still.  He has created a priceless legend.  If he be not immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambition, because he has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the history of that Service on which the life of his country depends.  The tradition of the great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the guarantee of the future.  He loved his country first, the Service next, the sea perhaps not at all.  But the sea loved him without reserve.  It gave him his professional distinction and his author’s fame—­a fame such as not often falls to the lot of a true artist.

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct.  He is not invincibly young and heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage.  For James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame-work, it was an essential part of existence.  He could hear its voice, he could understand its silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception alone.  His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea.  But he loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding.  In his sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its immense solitudes.  His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon.  They embrace the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise and the menace of the sea.

He knows the men and he knows the sea.  His method may be often faulty, but his art is genuine.  The truth is within him.  The road to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that—­only it is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time.  He has the knowledge of simple hearts.  Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the significance of a type.  It is hard to believe that Manual