whose expressions never lapse into the complaints of Nelson or the querulousness of Collingwood, was tried by the slow progress of his battered and crippled squadron.  “The prizes get on very slowly,” he writes; “but I am endowed with unparalleled patience, having scarcely uttered a murmur at their tardiness, so perfectly satisfied am I with the prospect before me.”  Some time later he notes:  “We have been three weeks effecting what might be accomplished in two days.  This extraordinary delay makes me more fractious than can be imagined, and I begin to lose the character for patience which I had given myself, by so tiresome a situation.”  It was still the season of westerly winds, and the voyage from Alexandria to Gibraltar occupied sixty-nine days.

The Orion was now completely worn out, having been continuously in commission since the war began in 1793.  Besides the three general actions in which Saumarez commanded her, she had borne a valiant part in Howe’s great battle of the 1st of June.  “This last business has so shattered the poor Orion” wrote Saumarez, “that she will not, without considerable repairs, be in a state for more service.”  On reaching England she was paid off; and in February, 1799, he was appointed to the Caesar, of eighty-four guns, one of the finest ships in the navy, which was to bear his flag in the last and most brilliant episode of his hard-fighting career.

A year later, Lord St. Vincent, having returned from the Mediterranean, took command of the Channel Fleet, and at once instituted in its methods, and particularly in the blockade of Brest, changes which gradually revolutionized the character of the general naval war; baffling beyond any other single cause the aims of Napoleon, and insuring the fall of his empire.  One of the new requirements was the maintenance of a powerful advanced division of six or eight ships-of-the-line, within ten miles of the harbor’s mouth.  It was a duty singularly arduous, demanding neither dash nor genius, but calmness, steadiness, method, and seamanship of a high order, for all which Saumarez was conspicuous.  From either side of the Bay of Brest a long line of reefs projects for fifteen miles to the westward.  Far inside their outer limits, and therefore embayed by the westerly winds which blow at times with hurricane violence, was the station of the advanced squadron, off some well-marked rocks of the northern reef, known as the Black Rocks.  On this spot, called Siberia by the seamen, during fifteen weeks, from August to December, Sir James Saumarez kept so close a watch that not a vessel of any force entered or left Brest.  “With you there,” wrote Earl St. Vincent, “I sleep as sound as if I had the key of Brest in my pocket.”  No work ever done by him was more meritorious or more useful.  Near its expiration St. Vincent wrote to him, “The employment you have conducted is the most important of this war.”  He there demonstrated that what before had apparently been thought