’In the Baltic, however, there was a little more fighting to show for the many millions sterling wrung from the British taxpayer.  To the coasts of Finland was sent a splendid Armada, commanded by one of the bravest seamen that ever adorned the glorious muster-roll of the Royal Navy of England, Admiral Sir Charles Napier.  Under his orders was Captain Augustus Hobart, in command of Her Majesty’s ship Driver.  “Lads, sharpen your cutlasses!” thus began the memorable manifesto addressed by the hero of St. Jean d’Acre to the gallant tars.  The Baltic fleet was to do wonders.  The lads, with their cutlasses very well sharpened, went aboard the Russian war-ships before Cronstadt, stormed the seven forts which guard the entrance to that harbour, and sailed up the Neva even to St. Petersburg itself.  It is true that ere the war was over a spy informed Lord Augustus Loftus, then Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Berlin, that a certain channel or waterway existed unguarded by any fort at all, by which a British flotilla with muffled oars could have got quietly into the Neva without taking the trouble to destroy the Russian fleet or to blow the seven forts of Cronstadt into the air.  The revelations of the spy went for nothing; and, after the cutlasses of the lads in blue-jackets had been sharpened to a razor-like degree of keenness, those blades, for some occult reason, were not allowed to cut deep enough; the only cutting—­and running into the bargain—­being done by the Russian fleet, which, safely ensconced in the harbour of Cronstadt, defied us from behind the walls of fortresses which we did not care to bombard.  Still, the Baltic fleet was not wholly idle.  There was some fighting and some advantage gained over the Russians at Helsingfors, at Arbo, and notably at Bomarsund.  In all these engagements Commander Hobart distinguished himself—­so brilliantly, indeed, as to be named with high approval in official despatches.

’Soldiers in peace, Bacon has remarked, are like chimneys in summer.  Hobart seemed resolved that the aphorism quoted by Francis of Verulam should not be verified in the case of sailors.  The fire of the Earl of Buckinghamshire’s son was always alight, and he became, during the great Civil War in America the boldest of blockade-runners.  When the Confederacy collapsed Hobart, by this time a Post-Captain, received overtures of employment from the Turkish Government, and in 1868 he was appointed, as Admiral Slade had been before him, to a high command in the Ottoman Navy.  It was a curious illustration of the various turns of fate here below to find in 1869 the Sultan, the Commander of the Faithful, sending the Giaour Hobart Pasha, the erst Secesh blockade-runner, to the island of Crete to put down blockade-running on the part of the intensely patriotic but occasionally troublesome Greeks.  Hobart was entrusted with unlimited powers, and he accomplished his mission with so much vigour and with so much skill as to insure the good graces of the Porte, and he soon rose to