His last recorded professional utterances are in private letters addressed in the summer of 1780 to the commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet—­Francis Geary—­who had served with him in the Bay of Biscay, though he missed Quiberon.  He recommends the maintenance of his old station off Brest, and says, “For God’s sake, if you should be so lucky as to get sight of the enemy, get as close to them as possible.  Do not let them shuffle with you by engaging at a distance, but get within musket shot if you can.  This will be the means to make the action decisive.”  In these words we find an unbroken chain of tradition between Hawke and Nelson.  One of Hawke’s pupils was William Locker; and Locker in turn, just before Hawke’s death, had Nelson for a lieutenant.  To him Nelson in after years, in the height of his glory, wrote, “To you, my dear friend, I owe much of my success.  It was you who taught me,—­’Lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him.’”

Hawke died October 16, 1781.  On his tomb appear these words, “Wherever he sailed, victory attended him.”  It is much to say, but it is not all.  Victory does not always follow desert.  “It is not in mortals to command success,”—­a favorite quotation with the successful admirals St. Vincent and Nelson.  Hawke’s great and distinctive glory is this,—­that he, more than any one man, was the source and origin of the new life, the new spirit, of his service.  There were many brave men before him, as there were after; but it fell to him in a time of great professional prostration not only to lift up and hand on a fallen torch, but in himself to embody an ideal and an inspiration from which others drew, thus rekindling a light which it is scarcely an exaggeration to say had been momentarily extinguished.

FOOTNOTES: 

[3] For the account of Mathews’s action, including Hawke’s personal share in it, see ante, pp. 21-47.

[4] By express orders from the Ministry Councils of War had to be held.

[5] An application for four days’ leave for private business had been refused.

RODNEY

1719-1792

Unlike Hawke, Rodney drew his descent from the landed gentry of England, and had relatives among the aristocracy.  The name was originally Rodeney.  We are told by his son-in-law and biographer that the Duke of Chandos, a connection by marriage, obtained the command of the Royal yacht for the admiral’s father, Henry Rodney.  In one of the trips which George I. frequently made between England and Hanover, he asked his captain if there were anything he could do for him.  The reply was a request that he would stand sponsor for his son, who accordingly received the name of George; his second name Brydges coming from the family through which Chandos and the Rodneys were brought into relationship.  The social position and surroundings resulting from