The story goes, that Countess Fanny sent her husband to Captain Kirby, at the emperor’s request, to inquire his name; and on hearing it, she struck her hands on her bosom, telling his Majesty he saw there the bravest man in the king’s dominions; which the emperor scarce crediting, and observing that the man must be, then, a superhuman being to be so distinguished in a nation of the brave, Countess Fanny related the well-known tale of Captain Kirby and the shipful of mutineers; and how when not a man of them stood by him, and he in the service of the first insurgent State of Spanish America, to save his ship from being taken over to the enemy,—­he blew her up, fifteen miles from land:  and so he got to shore swimming and floating alternately, and was called Old Sky-high by English sailors, any number of whom could always be had to sail under Buccaneer Kirby.  He fought on shore as well; and once he came down from the tops of the Andes with a black beard turned white, and went into action with the title of Kirby’s Ghost.

But his heart was on salt water; he was never so much at home as in a ship foundering or splitting into the clouds.  We are told that he never forgave the Admiralty for striking him off the list of English naval captains:  which is no doubt why in his old age he nursed a grudge against his country.

Ours, I am sure, was the loss; and many have thought so since.  He was a mechanician, a master of stratagems; and would say, that brains will beat Grim Death if we have enough of them.  He was a standing example of the lessons of his own maxims for men, a very curious book, that fetches a rare price now wherever a copy is put up for auction.  I shudder at them as if they were muzzles of firearms pointed at me; but they were not addressed to my sex; and still they give me an interest in the writer who would declare, that ’he had never failed in an undertaking without stripping bare to expose to himself where he had been wanting in Intention and Determination.’

There you may see a truly terrible man.

So the emperor being immensely taken with Kirby’s method of preserving discipline on board ship, because (as we say to the madman, ’Your strait-waistcoat is my easy-chair’) monarchs have a great love of discipline, he begged Countess Fanny’s permission that he might invite Captain Kirby to his table; and Countess Fanny (she had the name from the ballad

       ’I am the star of Prince and Czar,
        My light is shed on many,
        But I wait here till my bold Buccaneer
        Makes prize of Countess Fanny’:—­

for the popular imagination was extraordinarily roused by the elopement, and there were songs and ballads out of number), Countess Fanny despatched her husband to Captain Kirby again, meaning no harm, though the poor man is laughed at in the songs for going twice upon his mission.