post of anxiety and danger, with such responsibility upon him as few could ever have endured.  Let them remember Montholon’s remark:  “An angel from heaven would not have satisfied us.”  Let them recall also that Lowe with ample material never once troubled to state his own case.  “Je fais mon devoir et suis indifferent pour le reste,” said he, in his interview with the Emperor.  They were no idle words.

Apart from this particular epoch, French literature, which is so rich in all its branches, is richest of all in its memoirs.  Whenever there was anything of interest going forward there was always some kindly gossip who knew all about it, and was ready to set it down for the benefit of posterity.  Our own history has not nearly enough of these charming sidelights.  Look at our sailors in the Napoleonic wars, for example.  They played an epoch-making part.  For nearly twenty years Freedom was a Refugee upon the seas.  Had our navy been swept away, then all Europe would have been one organized despotism.  At times everybody was against us, fighting against their own direct interests under the pressure of that terrible hand.  We fought on the waters with the French, with the Spaniards, with the Danes, with the Russians, with the Turks, even with our American kinsmen.  Middies grew into post-captains, and admirals into dotards during that prolonged struggle.  And what have we in literature to show for it all?  Marryat’s novels, many of which are founded upon personal experience, Nelson’s and Collingwood’s letters, Lord Cochrane’s biography—­that is about all.  I wish we had more of Collingwood, for he wielded a fine pen.  Do you remember the sonorous opening of his Trafalgar message to his captains?—­

“The ever to be lamented death of Lord Viscount Nelson, Duke of Bronte, the Commander-in-Chief, who fell in the action of the 21st, in the arms of Victory, covered with glory, whose memory will be ever dear to the British Navy and the British Nation; whose zeal for the honour of his king and for the interests of his country will be ever held up as a shining example for a British seaman—­leaves to me a duty to return thanks, etc., etc.”

It was a worthy sentence to carry such a message, written too in a raging tempest, with sinking vessels all around him.  But in the main it is a poor crop from such a soil.  No doubt our sailors were too busy to do much writing, but none the less one wonders that among so many thousands there were not some to understand what a treasure their experiences would be to their descendants.  I can call to mind the old three-deckers which used to rot in Portsmouth Harbour, and I have often thought, could they tell their tales, what a missing chapter in our literature they could supply.