Author and publisher told one another “their fact” plainly enough in this case, and one rather wonders what lies hid under the asterisks. In the absence of information as to the proportion in which they respectively shared the profits of the stories written before 1837, one cannot undertake to say whether the unnamed publisher of fiery temper, advanced age, and small stature, received a lion’s share or not. If so, it must have represented a handsome sum, for Marryat was by no means one of the worst treated of authors. Colburn gave him £400 for “Frank Mildmay.” For “Mr. Midshipman Easy” he received £1,400, apparently in a lump sum. “The Pirate” and “The Three Cutters,” published together, brought him in £750. His other books were paid on the same scale, and he certainly did not edit the Metropolitan for nothing. His code of signals, which was not literature (and perhaps on that account only the more lucrative), was an appreciable income to him throughout his life. On the whole, Marryat seems to have found the profession of author sufficiently remunerative. His indignation with his publishers may be safely taken to be mainly a proof that, in common with most writing-men of his generation, he was a firm believer in the creed that authors are an ill-used body. This is no longer quite so orthodox as it was. The wind is rather blowing the other way, and it is becoming the right thing to say that authors have themselves to thank for their ill-luck if they do not earn as much as they ought, and must bear the burden like their fellow-men if they spend more than they earn. This good sense may corrupt into a cant as others have done, but it is good sense. Marryat—who would appear to have made three thousand pounds or so in 1835, for taking “Mr. Midshipman Easy” and the other two stories, with his copyrights and editorship, he can hardly have made less—was in any case not an example of an ill-paid author. If he had to complain of want of money it must have been because he was a gentleman of extravagant habits, with a fatal weakness for bad investments. To be sure, if an author were to be paid according to the pleasure he has given others, and if “the shop” which makes a profit on selling his work had to render some royalty on it for ever and ever, then indeed was Marryat, together with all those whose work is of the widely-read and lasting order, ill rewarded. But insuperable difficulties bar the road to that ideal. Since paper, printing, and advertisements must be provided, the provider of these necessary things must share; since the novelist cannot hawk his own goods in a barrow, he must pay somebody to do it for him; since the world’s copyright laws put a limit on the duration of proprietary right in books, there must come a time when they are at any man’s disposal to reprint. In the long run the balance of profit must needs be in favour of the shop. To be sure, the nation of authors may console itself by reflecting that it has its revenge. There is much on which the shop makes no gain, first or last.

The first of Marryat’s books is one which, for reasons very neatly stated by himself, may stand apart from the others. When he had given it three successors, he thought fit to publish a proclamation on the subject of his work in the Metropolitan, and in that document he described “Frank Mildmay” as fairly as any honest critic could do for him.

From which, even if internal evidence were not enough to prove it, we learn that, between the paying off of the Tees and the commissioning of the Ariadne, Marryat decided to have a general jail delivery of his old naval enemies, and that the result was “Frank Mildmay; or, The Naval Officer.” It cannot be said that the book is better than its origin. If Marryat had kept the promise he made in this proclamation of his to the readers of the Metropolitan—if he had re-written this so-called novel, he might, had he taken the right course, have made it one of the best of his works. He had only to make it an autobiography without disguise, to put in the good as well as the evil of his experience, to take care to explain everything to his readers, as he could well have done, and he would have given English literature a thing altogether unique—a naval memoir. We are not rich in memoirs, at least, not in good ones. The English hand is unhappy at that work. A man has only to turn to Ludlow, or Sir Philip Warwick, to see how lamentably little Englishmen of parts who lived through the most wonderful things could contrive to bring away with them—how little at least of the life, the colour, the dramatic swing of it all. Of the few we can show, which are not unfit to stand with the Frenchmen, Clarendon, Pepys, Colley Cibber, Evelyn (and four or five others), none were of the sea. “Cochrane’s Autobiography” maybe quoted against me, but even this, good as it is in places, is drowned in angry denunciations of human wickedness, and demonstrations that this or the other thing ought to have been done by official backsliders, so that what Cochrane did himself is almost crowded out. Besides, it is only a fragment, and then reste à savoir s’il n’est pas mort. It has not lived. One may, and must, use it for the history of the man and the time, but who reads it for its intrinsic literary merit? The French seamen have the better of us there. The memoirs of Forbin, of Duguay-Trouin, and even the recently published journal of a much less famous man, Jean Doublet, are capital reading. Marryat might, if he had so pleased, have done a book which would have been to the memoirs of Forbin what the memoirs of Clarendon are to the memoirs of Sully, to adopt the formula dear to Lord Macaulay. He might have done what Sir Walter Scott praised Basil Hall for attempting—have given in autobiographical form a picture of sea life, which would have been interesting, not only to those who already love the subject, but to all who love good reading. He did not so choose. He carried out his mission in another form, and “Frank Mildmay” remained as it first appeared.

That the book was so much of an autobiography was a misfortune for Marryat. He might protest as much as he pleased that he was not Frank Mildmay, and had not run a career of vice, but the impression left by the book was and is disagreeable. Why should a man attribute his own adventures to a tiger? Now, Frank Mildmay is a tiger—a very insolent, callous, young cub. It shows Marryat to have been very inexperienced indeed that he should have made such a mistake. He must have known that the adventures would be recognized. The naval world is a small one, and an exclusive. Naval officers live together by choice on shore as they do by necessity at sea. Everything written about the profession is talked over, and interpreted, when interpretation is needed. Every incident in “Frank Mildmay” was no doubt recognized at once; and when it was found that the things that had happened to the hero of the story were the adventures of the author, it is not to be wondered at that the two were thought to be also identical in character. Marryat, in fact, committed with himself the very error of judgment into which Dickens was led with Leigh Hunt, when he made Harold Skimpole a rascal, in order to prove that he was not a caricature of his friend. But there is something more than inexperience and error of judgment about “The Naval Officer.” Marryat can hardly have seen what a bad fellow he had drawn. Frank Mildmay has not only those “sins of the devil,” which may be worse, but are more dignified, than the sins of men—he errs not only by “pride and rebellion,” but he is a mean scamp; and I am afraid that Marryat did not see it. He was as blind to the faults of his bantling as Smollett was to the ruffianism of Roderick Random, or Fielding to the very vulgar inferiority of Tom Jones. Criticism seems to have opened his eyes, and little as he liked the lesson, he took the warning; but it was only for a time. Unfortunately he fell back on it. Percival Keene is just such another—a very low fellow, with a kind of wild boar courage. It would appear that Marryat did not see some things as plainly as one could wish he had done. It is unnecessary to insist on the faults of construction in a book which belonged to an altogether bastard genre. What merits it had—and they were sufficient to give promise of a brilliant novelist—were to be repeated in other books much more pleasant, and much more capable of repaying examination.

The other nine books which Marryat published in these seven years were “wholly fictitious in characters, in plot, and in events,” to quote his own words. In fact, they were stories, and what truth there is in them was not crudely taken from memory, but adapted and fitted into its place. The essential accuracy of the picture they give of sea life has never been questioned, at least it has never been challenged on serious grounds. It is undoubtedly the case that critics of a certain well-known stamp have been known to complain that no such series of adventures as these stories contain were ever known to occur, and that the daily life of a midshipman is not so amusing as Mr. Easy’s, nor so varied as Peter Simple’s. A criticism which only amounts to this—that the stories are stories, and not log-books, need hardly be seriously answered. Sailors read them, and always have read them. They are as popular in the American Naval School as they have been among English boys. To the skill with which the stories were built, less justice has been done. It has always, as it were, been taken for granted that Marryat owed everything to his experience as a seaman, and that, except in so far as he had seen things which other men had not seen, he was not of the race of novelists whose work lives. Now this is heresy. In truth, the sea life owes more to Marryat than he to the sea. No one meets Mr. Easy, or Terence O’Brien, or Mr. Chucks, or Mr. Vanslyperken in this commonplace world. He meets something out of which they may be made. Unquestionably his experience was of inestimable value to Marryat—as all exceptional experience is to all novelists. At the very beginning of his career he was complimented by Washington Irving on his good luck. “You have a glorious field before you, and one in which you cannot have many competitors, as so very few unite the author to the sailor.” No doubt it was Marryat’s happiness that he had so good a Sparta to cultivate—but, after all, the result was primarily due to the skill of the cultivator. Speaking as one who has a full share of the good English taste for reading about the things of the sea, I am inclined to maintain that few kinds of books are more tedious than sea stories which ask to be read and enjoyed simply because they are sea stories. Battle, and storm, and shipwreck may be poured out on you, and yet leave you cold. These things by themselves in fiction are capable of being as tiresome as the once prevalent detective, or now popular religious disputations. To compare the stock sea story with the great books of travel—with Dampier, or with Anson’s Voyage, or with Basil Ringrose—would be unfair. We do not need to compare the best of one kind with the worst of another. But they will not stand reading even with Captain Hacke’s dingy little compilation, or with the long winded journal of Woodes Rogers. The reality of the latter is some compensation for their undoubted dulness. At least in reading them one knows that one is looking at a strange old life told by the men who lived it. When taken by a workman and badly used, the adventures these actual adventurers passed through and recorded become merely badly used material. A painter was once shown the scrawlings of a youthful prodigy who had been covering paper with pictures of ships and sailors. He was asked whether these works did not show a genius for art. “No,” said the judicious artist, “the boy has been reading sea stories, and his head is full of them. He draws because he likes the things, not because he loves drawing.” The verdict stated a great critical truth—and, however unpleasant it may be to prodigies to learn that taste and faculty are not identical, and that they must rely on their power of interpreting their subject, and not on the subject itself, it is the case, nevertheless.

Now with Marryat the faculty was always equal to the fusing and managing of the materials. In “Japhet,” where he does not touch the sea at all, he has yet contrived to impart life and interest to his puppets and their doings. It may stand by “Con Cregan” in the long list of stories which began with “Guzman de Alfarache,” and includes “Moll Flanders” and “Peregrine Pickle.” In this case Marryat’s best knowledge was not available and he had to rely on his power of re-using well-worn materials. Where his experience and his ability combined, he attained to a very considerable degree of narrative skill. Whether he had trained himself by early reading or not (and indeed there is nothing to show that he was a reader), he had early command of a very admirable narrative style. It might be plausibly maintained that this was a heritage among seamen. There is nothing in English literature at once more simple, more manly, more perfectly adequate to its purpose than the language of Dampier. In Marryat’s own time this power had not been lost by English seamen. The navy may have been a rough school, but there was nothing in its training which made men unable to use the pen, and use it well. As an example of flowing, and also perfectly unaffected, description, the account of the battle of the Nile, given by Captain Miller, of the Theseus, is without fault. It deserves a place of honour in every collection of English letters. The beauty of Collingwood’s letters is acknowledged even by those who have thought fit to carp at his character. Marryat brought this style to his literary work, and kept it unchanged to the end. It is a style in which there is no straining. Marryat never had recourse, as his contemporary, Michael Scott, was wont, to capital letters, italics, and broken lines when he wished to impress his readers. He never appears even to have been particularly anxious to impress. When a wreck or a battle comes in his way, it is told as Captain Miller might have told it. Therefore it has its effect, and convinces you, as the narrative of the battle of the Nile does, that the thing described had been seen, had been lived through. The most famous of his passages—the club-hauling of the Diomede, the fight with the Russian frigate in “Mr. Midshipman Easy”—the destruction of the French liner at the end of “The King’s Own”—are too long for quotation; but in “Peter Simple” there is one which is of not unmanageable length, and which shows the qualities of his writing at their best. It is the account of the hurricane which threw Peter on the coast of St. Pierre:—

Now this might have come straight from another Dampier. There is no attempt to convince you of the force of the hurricane by laborious descriptions of what it looked like. It is shown to be awful by the effect it produces. The sentences go rapidly on. Their very simplicity helps to convey the impression of the suddenness and overwhelming fury of the storm. The effect would have been lost if the writer had stopped to talk. The style seems to me to be the perfection of prose, for a tale of adventure—the straightforward, almost colloquial report of one who has gone through it all, carried to its very best—made into literature without being obtrusively literary.

As the style is, so are the stories. A natural tact seems to have told Marryat when he had gone far enough in search of the strange. His heroes lead lives that are possible. He might, if he had chosen, have rivalled Michael Scott’s wondrous pirates. Once, indeed, in “Percival Keene,” he actually did it, but, as a rule, his pirate is a conceivable good-for-nothing rather cowardly blackguard, such as came in the natural course of things to swing at Kingston or at Execution Dock. Even Cain himself, “The Pirate,” is within the bounds of probability as compared with the wondrous Spanish Americans, or astounding Scotch gentlemen of superhuman wickedness, who flourish in “Tom Cringle’s Log,” and the “Cruise of the Midge.” Neither do incidents of the wilder and more horrific kind appear in Marryat’s books. There is nothing in him, for instance, like that scene of the “Midge in the Hornets’ nest,” which may, by the way, be commended to the attention of critics who think that blood and horror have been recently imported into romance by a generation which is supposed to have been corrupted by the French taste of the decadence. The adventures of Marryat’s heroes might possibly and even probably have befallen an officer of his time.

Of construction, except such as was imposed by an instinctive desire to make the incidents follow one another in some sort of natural sequence, there is little or no sign. When, as in “Peter Simple,” he tries to fit one on to his story, it is no addition to the merits of the book. Who cares a straw for Peter’s wicked uncle, for the changing of the children, or for the unravelling of the very transparent mystery? It is too obvious that Marryat took these things at random from the common fund of the Minerva Press. What he took from nobody was his fun.

After all, it is this fun which is the living element in Marryat’s work. Wit, or humour of the highest class, he cannot be said to have possessed, though he was by no means destitute of the sympathy which is inseparable from all true humour. The sketch of the mate, Martin, in “Midshipman Easy,” is a sufficient defence against the charge of want of feeling, if, indeed, it had ever been made. Many who have had a more visible anxiety to be pathetic than Marryat have failed to draw so touching a figure as this slight outline of the melancholy officer, in whom the disappointments of years have crushed all hope, without hardening or souring him. “No, no,” said the mate, when his acting order as lieutenant was brought him as he lay wounded in his hammock, “I knew very well that I never should be made. If it is not confirmed, I may live; but if it is, I am sure to die.” And die he does, because hope deferred has dried up the spring of life within him. In the character of Mr. Chucks kindness and fun are mingled. He is respectable in spite of his absurdities, and lovable because of them. In the Dominie in “Jacob Faithful” there is an effort to produce a second Mr. Chucks, but it is not successful. He is too plainly a reminiscence of another Dominie—a fairly well-done copy, but only a copy. For the most part the fun of Marryat belongs to the grotesque order. This, unquestionably, is not the highest. But what is not the highest may yet be genuine, and that Marryat’s fun, as the world has now recognized for half a century, undoubtedly is. His gallery of “figures of fun” is a long one. Peter Simple in the days before Terence O’Brien made a man of him; Jack Easy before he had been converted from a belief in the equality of all men; in a rougher way his father; Mr. Muddle; and, above all, Mr. Chucks, have an intrinsic comic vis. The fun which they make, or which goes on about them, is never mere horse-play. They are not mannikins of the stamp of Smollett’s Pallet, created only to be knocked about, and to make grimaces, but possible, and even probable, human beings—a little distorted, a little exaggerated, put frequently into such positions as are more fit for farce than comedy, but not on that account ceasing to be real.

Here is farce, but farce which almost borders on comedy. Given Jack Easy with his natural pluck and his absurd training, suddenly put into a man-of-war, and set to reconcile the practice of the service with the ideal picture of it presented by the articles of war, and this is precisely what might be expected to happen. The absurdity always arises from the clash of the characters; and though it be farce, it is farce of the highest order. Rarely does the grotesque lean to the horrible. The death of Mr. Vanslyperken is a case in which it does; but Marryat was, for the most part, content to amuse, and to amuse only.

How well he succeeded we all know. Which of us has not laughed with him ever since we were boys? Mr. Chucks stands between Commodore Trunnion and Mr. Micawber. The scene I have quoted above, and a dozen others, live by the side of Pipe’s journey to the garrison with the nymph of the road. The adventures in battle and wreck are very good, but they are not the best. Romance of the brilliant order Marryat did not often try, and when he did, he was at best but moderately successful. He was more of the race of Defoe than of Dumas. But from Defoe, over whom no man ever laughed, he was divided by his love of laughter, and power of drawing it forth. His fun may be often mere animal spirits, but at least it was spontaneous, and was by natural instinct literary. He did not toil and labour to be funny. Even in his most hasty work he would hit off a scene with neat pen-strokes, marking just enough and no more. Take, for instance, the revenue officers in “The Three Cutters.” Lieutenant Appleboy and his companions are introduced simply because he had seen them, and as much for his own amusement as his readers. Marryat had seen the types when he was doing preventive work himself in the Rosario, and drew them out of his memory when he needed them. Some of his figures were doubtless portraits—all of them had possibly some touch of portraiture. But on his paper they have an interest altogether independent of their originals. There are, as Mr. Saintsbury, speaking of the personalities of Daudet, has said, two ways of drawing portraits in literature. The first is to adapt your sitter into somebody else whom we love for his own sake. The second is to give us an image for which we should care but little if it was not meant for A or B. Of these two methods Marryat took the first. If there was an original to Terence O’Brien we should like to have known him; but, whether or not, we like Terence for his own sake. Was there a boatswain in His Majesty’s Service who stood for Mr. Chucks? Possibly; but what then? In Marryat’s stories are types as well as individuals. They and their doings have an independent universal truth.

CHAPTER VII.

When Marryat was about to start for the United States he gave a reason of some gravity for his proposed trip. The last words of the “Diary on the Continent” propound a serious question: “Do the faults of this people (to wit, the Swiss) arise from the peculiarity of their constitutions, or from the nature of their government? To ascertain this, one must compare them with those who live under similar institutions. I must go to America—that’s decided.” A biographer of any virtue will desire to be inspired with the Boswellian spirit—to write as loyally as Macaulay did of Addison—but I cannot quite believe that Marryat’s visit to America was caused by a sudden passion for the study of comparative politics, and the influence of institutions on national character. A more plausible explanation could be found. It was excellently given by the elder Mr. Weller in the course of some remarks made for the benefit of Mr. Pickwick. To write a book about America was a favourite enterprise with literary persons in those years. Miss Martineau and Mrs. Trollope had just done it, and there was no reason why Marryat should not do it also. A taste for seeing the world may have helped to turn his activity in that direction, and, besides he was, as will be seen, on the lookout for promising speculations, and may have had some thoughts on copyright. Possibly none of these motives were very clear to himself, and he may really have thought he was going to study American institutions.

Moved by sufficient motives, whether the alleged or the unconsciously felt, he did go to America by the packet Quebec in 1837, did stay there for two years, and write a book about the States in six volumes, and two series. Of this book it may be said, in a favourite phrase of the writer whom Marryat described as “Mr. Carlisle, the author of ‘Sartor Resartus’” (a slip which was dreadfully avenged), that “it is forgetable.” Marryat’s diary and remarks show that he would have made an excellent newspaper correspondent. He had a faculty for getting up information, a quick eye, and a ready pen. With these qualities a man can easily make “copy” out of a visit to a new country. Indeed, Marryat was no novice at the work, for which his “Diary on the Continent” had prepared him. When his six volumes on America are judged as what they were, they are on the whole creditable. He made the Americans very angry, but that it was never difficult to do. He had provocation to write more bitterly than he did. But whatever may be the merits of, or the excuses for, the thing, it is hardly worth while to return to “newspaper correspondence” at the end of half a century. Unless the correspondent has seen history in the making, and has noted it well so as to become an original authority, he can hardly hope to be read two generations or so later on. The worst of it, too, is that Marryat saw something which was well worth recording, and did not record it properly. A large part of his book is taken up with contradicting Miss Martineau; and who can rejoice in the refutation of an almost forgotten book by a still more forgotten book?

The incidents of the visit form an interesting passage in Marryat’s life. He reached New York in the midst of the great financial smash of 1837, and saw the “Empire City” in all the excitement of panic. He stayed in America till after the suppression of the Canadian rising, and himself took part in the fighting. Of course he had a newspaper controversy—and it was of a kind sufficiently honourable to himself. When he first landed Marryat seems to have been well received, though with a certain reserve. By reserve is not to be understood anything so absurd as that he was left alone. On the contrary, he was abundantly overwhelmed with inquiry and comment. But the Americans were then in the midst of one of the sorest of their sore fits with foreign comment, and were (not quite unjustifiably) on their guard against travellers who came to spy out the land, and make a book about it. They were not averse to comment, but they were anxious that it should not only be favourable, but of exactly that kind of favourableness of which they approved. Therefore they were intent to know whether Marryat meant to write about them, and, if so, what he meant to say. He extricated himself from the difficulty dexterously enough, and, on the whole, succeeded in keeping on friendly terms with his hosts. As a matter of course, American copyright institutions, and their effect on the national character of the publisher, had their share of his attentions. In this respect, also, his experiences were pleasing enough in America. He was working in the intervals of observation. For American consumption he wrote a play, “The Ocean Waif; or, The Channel Outlaw,” which appeared at a New York theatre; and he was moreover engaged on “The Phantom Ship.” In 1838 he made an arrangement with Messrs. Carey and Hart to sell them “proof sheets of his ‘Diary in America’ and ‘Phantom Ship,’ a month prior to their publication in London, for the sum of two thousand two hundred and fifty dollars; and provided no one else published the works in America within thirty days from the date they issued from their press, a further sum of two hundred and fifty dollars.” Whether pirate enterprise deprived him of the extra sum needed to make up the round two thousand five hundred, does not appear, but at least Marryat, with his usual turn for business, contrived to get something out of America for the amusement he had given it.

A letter to his mother, pleasant and manly as all his letters to her were, gives a sufficient picture of the first part of his stay in America.

From this letter it may be gathered that in October, 1837, Marryat was, in good humour with America, and was seriously thinking of a study of it which should be a possession for ever. America was, on the whole, well pleased with him. He had been civilly received, with a certain reserve as might have been expected, seeing that he was a writing man, who had come with the hardly disguised intention of writing, and after many who had written by no means acceptably; but still, in spite of this natural wariness, with kindness. He was a good talker and showed it. He had kinsmen in the States who helped him on. Altogether things had gone smoothly with him. The Americans had even been glad to acknowledge his connection with Boston, and some of them had given him a helping hand in that great copyright fight in which the sympathy of the more right-minded has never been denied to the English author, but has also never been of any effect Unfortunately this very trip to Canada led to a storm which put Marryat for a time into the position of best-abused man on the continent.

At Toronto he was naturally asked to a public dinner, and also naturally requested to speak. In the course of his speech he, again very naturally, took occasion to mention, in a laudatory manner, the cutting out of the Caroline, by Lieutenant Drew. This feat had then made some noise in the world. Canada was in a disturbed condition, and the confusion had been fomented by filibustering from the United States territory. The Caroline had been fitted out to help the rebels, and had been “cut out” in gallant style from under the guns of Fort Schlosser on the American side of the river, after sharp fighting by a Lieutenant Drew and a body of Canadian volunteers. After capturing the vessel and removing her crew, the Canadians had sent her down over the falls of Niagara. The incident was one of which the loyalists were with good reason proud. As an Englishman, as a naval officer, and as a speaker at a public dinner, Marryat was triply justified in praising “Captain Drew (as he styled him), and his brave comrades who cut out the Caroline.” Nothing ought to have been a more complete matter of course than that he should propose their health. But Americans were then in a particularly thin-skinned state, even for them. They chose to be very angry with him for doing what any American officer would have done under similar circumstances, at least as loudly. What may be called the spirit of Hannibal Chollop awoke within them, and a chorus of denunciation was begun at once, in the most loud-mouthed and abusive style of American journalism. Paragraphs headed “More Insolence,” and so forth, appeared in abundance. Marryat’s books and his effigy were publicly burnt. When he returned from Canada to the States, deputations waited on him, much in the frame of mind of the enlightened citizens who were so indignant when Martin Chuzzlewit offended a free people by coming back from Eden. As a matter of course, any stick was good enough to serve the turn of American journalism. He was accused, among other things, of having “insulted and contradicted, and refused to drink wine” with Henry Clay. The story was, it is needless to say, only a piece of Yankee smartness, but Marryat drought it necessary to appeal to that distinguished politician for a certificate of character, and obtained from him an assurance that their meeting had afforded mutual satisfaction. In short, the whole business was one of those displays of noisy gregarious folly of which our American cousins are occasionally guilty. It was rather more absurd than a recent incident of the same sort, because Marryat was merely a traveller, and was speaking on British territory when he gave the toast which Yankee journalism chose to think offensive. But the old colonial hatred of England (not yet perhaps so entirely dead as after-dinner orators are accustomed to assert) was then full of vigorous life. Americans were wavering between reluctance to plunge into war, and desire to do the old country a damage by helping the rebellious French Canadians. In this divided state of mind they relieved their feelings by howling at Marryat, because he had not “cracked them up accordingly.”

Marryat extricated himself from this pass with commendable nerve and dexterity. He faced and soft-sawdered the deputations. He took the burning of his books very coolly, went about as before, and finally had it out with his hosts at a dinner given him at Cincinnati. The speech, which is far too long to quote, is full of the manly good sense which the American, when not acting in the characters of raving journalist or anxious candidate, will commonly listen to. Marryat reminded his hearers that he had spoken in British territory to his countrymen, and that their own patriotic orators were not averse to waving the banner habitually, or restrained from doing so by the knowledge that an Englishman was present. His hosts being simply American gentlemen, sitting in their right senses, agreed with him. A somewhat dramatic finish was given to this stage of the incident by Captain J. Pierce, who had been captain of the American privateer Ida when she was taken by the Newcastle, of which Marryat was then second lieutenant. Captain Pierce got on his legs to thank Marryat for the courtesy and good nature he had shown to himself and other prisoners. “The Wizard of the Sea,” as the American newspapers loved to call him when they were not in a flaming rage, might consider that, as far as his hosts at Cincinnati could answer for it, he was cleared of the charge of insulting the great American people. Their opinion, like that of the “respectable American,” in so many other matters, did not avail to stop all annoyance. Marryat continued to be pestered by abuse, frequently conveyed in unpaid letters. At last, and somewhat weakly, in October of 1838, he published a general protest in the form of a letter to the editors of the Louisville Journal, wherein he denied with much detail that he intended to spy out the barrenness of the land. He was, of course, answered as offensively as might be.

Marryat had perhaps begun by this time to discover that it was not so easy to write of America in a philosophic spirit as he had once thought. To be sure he had laid himself open to annoyance by going to the States at all, and still more by going there with the intention of writing a book.

The Canadian troubles were destined to break into his tour again. In the autumn of 1838 the French population rose in open rebellion, and, as is commonly the fate of insurgents, gained some preliminary successes, which made their final punishment all the more severe. Marryat remembering that he was an English naval officer still on the active list, gave up philosophic inquiry, hurried back to Canada, and volunteered for service under Sir John Colborne. This officer, a veteran of the Great War, and one who had had a distinguished share in winning the battle of Waterloo, made short work of the rising. Marryat saw some fighting once more in his life, and described it briefly in another of his capital letters to his mother.