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steps which lead to it that he smelleth as much of pitch and tar as those that were swaddled in sail cloth, his having an escutcheon will be so far from doing him harm that it will set him upon the advantageground. It will draw a real respect to his quality when so supported, and give him an influence and authority infinitely superior to that which the mere seaman can ever pretend to."

In other words, the gentleman, thoroughly trained in his profession, is the best officer, but he must have the training. "To expect that Quality alone should waft men up into places and employments is as un

reasonable as to think that a ship because it is carved and gilded should be fit to go to sea without sails or tackling. But when a gentleman maketh no other use of his Quality than to incite him the more to his duty, it will give such a true and settled superiority as must destroy all competition from those that are below him."

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He then says that "it is time now to go to the probationary qualifications of an officer at sea but does not do so. Instead, he changes his mind, and tells us that, although he has some ideas on the subject, yet he does not want to seem out of his slender stock of reason to dictate to the wisdom of the nation. "And whenever the Parliament shall think fit to take this matter into their consideration, I am sure they will not want for their direction the auxiliary reasons of any man without doors, much

less of one whose thoughts are so entirely and unaffectedly resigned to whatever they shall determine in this or anything else relating to the public."

A touching, but quite unwarranted, faith in Parliamentary institutions! My Lord Halifax, one would almost think, winds up his essay with a laugh behind his sleeve. He seems to mean that it is not worth his while going into details, as Parliament will not pay him any attention, and in any case is certain to make a mess of the whole thing.

The essay is that of & thoughtful man in advance of his times. The careful preparation of young officers did not really begin till he had been many years in the grave, and many tides rolled up and down England's "moat" before men realised that experience backed by early training was better than experience alone. Training helps an officer to profit to the utmost by his experience.

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The "men of Wapping" no longer hold Commissions, and it is just possible that we have gone too far in the direction but of excluding all Quality. There are many naval officers who think that it was a grave mistake to close the Keyham College and abolish the old order of Engineer Officer-in his way a "man of Wapping," though he was swaddled in "waste" rather than sail-cloth, and smelt not of pitch but of warm oil. It is a disputable point, moreover, whether a larger number of commissions should not be

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given to warrant officers. sole answer now, as in 1694,

The number so given at present is almost negligible, and Warrant Officers are only promoted to fill a few billets in which they do not come into contact with the officer of Quality. That a "ranker" in the Army may win a Commission is undoubtedly on the whole an excellent thing for that service; that the practical impossibility of ever rising above warrant rank is something of a damper on the praiseworthy ambitions, and therefore detrimental to the character of the lowerdeck, can hardly be denied. "A W. O. in the Ward-room!" exclaims the officer; 66 we are all at much too close quarters at sea for that sort of thing." Well, the Engineer Officer very soon gets or got, as he is becoming a thing of the past his awkward corners rubbed off; and if a man has had the ability to rise from "boy" to "W. O.," in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will have the nous to study and assimilate the manners and customs of his new messmates. But this is a digression perhaps hardly warranted by Lord Halifax's essay.

It is indeed true that "it may be said now to England, Martha, Martha, thou art busy about many things" (old-age pensions and games of football); and to the question "What shall we do to be saved in this world?" the

is, "Look to your moat."

Oversea

Lord Halifax held no highly developed theories about the use of Sea Power. He is even something of a Little Englander. "Our situation hath made greatness abroad by land conquests unnatural to us.” The idea of a Colonial empire is unknown to him, and we may gather that an possession was not regarded by him as a source of strength. But he is absolutely persuaded that England must be defended by sea, and that an efficient fleet is the Cornerstone of the realm. If this was a lesson to be laid to heart by a statesman of his time, how much more ought those who are now responsible for our national safety to consider the war readiness of the fleet as a matter of primary and essential importance. Then there was no nation in arms over against us; Holland was exhausted, and France, though hostile, had no great reputation for efficiency at sea. Then, a foul wind would upset any calculation; now, ships run like trains. If insult and invasion were possibilities then, they may certainly be said to be probabilities now, if we ever allow our Navy to be in such a position that it cannot utterly prevent a hostile armada from taking possession of our moat.

H. B. MONEY-COUTTS.

OLD IRISH TRAVEL.

INTREPID mortals who ventured upon a journey to Ireland in the eighteenth century regarded themselves as men of heroic mould, bent upon a very hazardous enterprise: of this number was a certain individual named Bush, who visited Ireland in 1764, and gave his experiences to the world in a volume entitled 'Hibernia Curiosa.' He was impelled to this great enterprise, so he tells us in his preface, by the misrepresentations contained in certain books which had not long before appeared. "The greater part of these," he exclaims indignantly, "appear to have been wrote implicitly from tradition or the hearsay of other, people. Every gentleman who has been through the country knows that what they palm off upon us for natural history has no existence but in their own or the imagination of others, and even of such subjects as have some existence in nature are as much like the originals indeed as & sixpenny picture of KING-GEORGE & QUEEN-SHARLOT stuck up with a cat's head in a pottage - pot against the walls of a cottage in Lancashire" resembles their most august Majesties, was no doubt what our author meant to say if his anger had not got the better of his literary style. By natural history the worthy Bush did not mean any description of the flora and fauna of the sister isle, but rather of the

ways and manners of its inhabitants; and to rectify the misconceptions caused by would-be tour-writers, whose longest journey he verily believed to have been from their own dwellings to the nearest chophouse, he set out from Chester by the turnpike road which had not long before been constructed to Holyhead. The stage-coach accomplished the distance very comfortably, so he tells us, in two days, and after "jumbling" up and down the Welsh mountains he reached Holyhead, that ne plus ultra of terra firma. There he began to feel some of his courage and his zest for the enterprise he had undertaken oozing away. He confesses that it was with apprehension, not unmix't with fear, that he surveyed the yawning "gulph" before him and the floating carriage which was to convey him across it, and reflected that there would be but a few inches between his cabin and a bed of salt water. To reassure himself somewhat he sought out the captain, and that jolly mariner recommended a bottle of claret as the best specific, if not against the perils of the sea, at least for putting the terrors of it out of his mind.

With or without the claret Bush got safely to the other side, though only after beating in the teeth of the wind for forty hours. His first impressions of the Irish metropolis were not very favourable, as it

did not contain a single inn, so he assures us, where an Englishman with any sense of decency would have been satisfied with his quarters, and there were not more than two or three in the whole town into which an Englishman would have set foot at all. In his first hostelry, situated in Essex Street, Bush had to pay a shilling a night for a bed two feet wide, in a room not much more than double that width. Through the good offices of a coffee-house acquaintance he shortly found a clean and neat room for himself elsewhere, but he had to pay half a guinea a week for it, which he considered excessive.

In the country districts through which Bush journeyed the conditions were somewhat better. The inns were clean and reasonably comfortable, and the roads too were fairly good, though not equal to those in England. He added, however, that if his horse had been gifted with the powers of Balaam's ass he would certainly have lifted up his voice in protest at the treatment he met with. The poverty of the people was so great that every handful of good hay and straw which was grown was expended not only upon their own bedding and the thatch of their dwellings, but also in making their horse-furniture, the whole of which, saddles, bridles, stirrups and all, was composed of sugauns-i.e., straw ropes. The refuse at the bottom of the stacks and the spoilt and rotted hay, of which, owing to bad methods of harvesting,

there was but too much, were considered good enough for horses. Only once during his journeying in Ireland did Bush succeed in obtaining a clean, dry bed for his horse, and that was when his host happened also to be a farmer. Bush arrived at the auspicious moment when his men were busy threshing, and he insisted on seizing upon as much of the straw as afforded his horse a good bed for that one night at any rate.

SO

Unhappily the two characteristics which impressed our traveller most most amongst the upper classes in Ireland were their predilection for duelling and for excessive drinking. It amazed him that a race kindly and so hospitable should yet be ready on the smallest provocation, often for an offence given by sheer inadvertence, to run each other through the body, or to perforate each other's skulls with a brace of pistol-balls. Like most visitors to Ireland Bush met with unbounded hospitality, his only difficulty being to avoid swallowing five times more liquor than he had a mind for. wine consumed was almost entirely claret, of which, in the year of Bush's visit, 8000 tuns were imported into Dublin alone. It was cheap, for the best claret procurable in Dublin cost but half-a-crown a bottle, whilst the price of that ordinarily drunk was only two shillings. Even a middling drinker, our author tells us, could carry off his four bottles without being in the least disordered thereby, and in Ireland a man was looked upon as a

The

mere nincompoop with his

bottle if he could not take off his gallon coolly. It was indeed impossible, so it seemed to him, to make an Irishman, who was anything of a drinker, drunk with claret. At the end of five or six bottles he might perhaps be a little flashy, but you might drink him to eternity, and he would never be anything more. Shortly after Bush's arrival in Dublin, one very hospitable individual, to whom he had just been introduced, said genially to him: "Well, sir, as you are come over quite a stranger to the country, it behoves us to make it as agreeable as we can. There is a company of us to meet at the Black Rock on a jolly party on Sunday next, and by there is to be five or six dozen of claret to be emptied. Will you give us the honour of your company?" The number of the assemblage by whom this exploit was to be accomplished was not mentioned, but Bush declined the pressing invitation.

These ultra-convivial habits are attested and deplored by many other writers of the time. "Make your head while you are young," was advice frequently given by elders to their juniors. It was said that no man who drank ever died of drink, but that many died learning to drink. Many were the devices adopted by the ingenious to circumvent the endeavours of those who would fain remain sober. Some hosts had their decanters made round below like a soda-water bottle of the present day, the only

stand for them being at the head of the table before the master of the house. Everyone was therefore obliged to fill his glass at once and pass the bottle on, unless he desired to upset its contents over the table. Others adopted the simpler but quite as efficacious plan of knocking the stems off the wine-glasses, so that they would not stand, but had to be emptied as fast as they were filled. Nay, hospitality went to such lengths that a man who accepted an invitation to dine was very likely to have his boots and his horse locked up, and to be detained willynilly a guest for two or three days.

One young fellow about this time, being on his way to college in Dublin, was invited to spend a few days en route at the house of an old friend of his father's. The night of his arrival there was as usual a drinking - party, and he was plied with bumpers till he sank senseless under the table. Determined to escape this fate upon the second night of his stay, he waited till the company had well started upon their potations, and then endeavoured to steal unperceived out of the window. He was detected, however. The ory of "Stole away!" was immediately raised, and with loud and vigorous view-halloos the whole company gave chase. In the condition they were in it did not give him much trouble to evade the pursuit, and he found shelter for the night in a ruined chapel within the demesne. In the early

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