Atlantic, and taken shelter in one of the Canary Islands, and he started for those regions immediately. It was the 13th April when he sailed-the Ides-and we have no doubt that the veteran, who always kept up his classics, and talked about them whenever he could get a chance, remembered Mæcenas's birthday, and ran over the Est mihi nonum in which Horace celebrates it. But this reminds us, as he sails southward, that we ought to peep over the shoulder of his old biographer of the last century, and form, out of the personal details which he gives us, some portrait of him in his ship.

ever

He was always, at bottom, an earnest, grave, pious man-a Puritan gentleman of the highest breed. No oath was heard in his vessel, as we know from one who lived to tell the fact to the writer just mentioned. All the ordinances of religion were kept in his fleet as in the most decorous town; days of humiliation, too, on due occasions, when he himself 'prayed in publick with his people.' Yet he was not without a singular relish for humour, and even sarcasm; he kept up a good knowledge of polite literature (which no fanatic ever does), and had even the pleasant human weakness of liking it to be known that he had not forgotten his scholarship while defending Taunton or chasing Van Tromp. He had those local, homely feelings, often found in great men, and generally in kindly ones; for instance, he would get his bread, cheese, and beer from Somersetshire, and had a Bridgewater man about him with whom he liked to chat of the people and places of his native town. All these traits are very English, and remind one a good deal of Lord Collingwood. In person he was five feet and a half high, of a sanguine complexion, and had a certain species of dignity yet simplicity about him.

'The last thing he did after he had given his commands to his men,' says the Biographer of 1740, was to pray with the above-mentioned Mr. Bear' [afterwards Mayor of Bridgewater, and the writer's informant], 'after which he would say, "Thomas, bring me the pretty cup of sack." He would then sit down, and give Thomas liberty to do so, and inquire what news he had of the Bridgewater men, &c.; then eating a little bread, with two or three glasses of canary wine, he went to bed.'

We are now near the end of this great and good man's career, and his last bit of service was worthy of his whole life. It was one of the most daring things any hero ever did, and wonderful when viewed as the work of a man far gone in deadly disease, and at the head of an over-worked and ill-furnished squadron. When the Spanish admiral at Santa Cruz heard of Blake's design, he prepared for a desperate defence. The harbour,

D 2

shaped

shaped like a horseshoe, was defended by a regular castle. Forts lined the inner part of the bay; and the forts were connected with the castle by a line of earthworks. To these preparations were added the vessels of the silver fleet itself-the treasure having been previously carried ashore from it to the town-and the galleons disposed with their broadsides outwards at the narrow entrance. Other vessels formed still another line inside these, and not a spot but what was made available for musket or cannon. It was literally like going into the lion's jaw.

Monday, the 20th April, 1657, came; and as the day dawned on the Peak of Teneriffe and the Happy Isles the canvas of Blake's squadron loomed high out of the sea. The Spaniards were ready, and waiting. The sick Admiral rose from his bed, came out into the fresh breeze which filled the sails and hurried them on towards the enemy, and called a council of war. He laid his plans for an attack before them, and every body knew he must do his best, and that the risk was tremendous. Prayers were offered up before breakfast, and then the terrible day's work began.

The partition of labour was very simple. Blake took to himself and his division, the attack on the castle and batteries. To Stayner was entrusted the attack on the galleons, the Admiral no doubt remembering his recent practice in that way. They had twenty-five ships and frigates between them. Forward went the gallant Stayner with his vice-admiral's pendant streaming from the Speaker in the van of all. Castle, batteries, galleons, he had to run the gauntlet of their freshest fire, and he did so, right into a semicircle of shot, but near to the special craft that he meant to take. Blake followed immediately, took the shore work to himself, and left Stayner the galleons. It soon became a simple question of cannonading, and the English cannonading was the best. The fire from the forts slackened by degrees, and batteries were shut up one by one. At noon, Blake could spare a little time to help Stayner. At two the English had conquered. Two Spanish ships had gone down, and every vessel in harbour was on fire. A shift of wind came with such wonderful felicity to carry them out again, that it was esteemed distinctly providential. They left the place a wreck, and yet themselves got away with fifty men only killed, and a hundred and fifty wounded. Nothing even in Blake's career ever so much delighted the English nation, or called forth so much wonder and admiring applause. What especially excited surprise and speculation was that the Admiral should have destroyed the Spanish fleet while under the protection of stone walls, and this fact not only drew a very celebrated remark from Clarendon, but is even now pressed

into service as bearing on existing controversies. 'He was the first man who ever brought the fleet to contemn castles on shore,' says Clarendon. Mr. Dixon thinks it necessary, in the preface to his cheap edition, to make the exploit the ground of hinting at the inferior practice of some modern admirals. This is no doubt a popular topic; but for our own parts,-remembering the great diversities of opinion which exist between the best practical men on this question of wooden walls v. stone ones; remembering how heavy the loss at Algiers was, though the fortifications, there, were wretched compared with those now existing in the great military countries of Europe; bearing in mind the dictum of the Duke of Wellington, and the remarks of Sir Howard Douglasfor our own parts, we say, we should decline the responsibility of giving a decided opinion on the subject. There is not a more important question than the degree to which the changes of the last half century have affected England's naval supremacy. But it is a question which only time can decide, and which cannot be discussed in the meanwhile without a degree of technical and special knowledge, very rarely found out of the circle of professional men. Enough, if the general body of popular writers supply authentic accounts of the exploits of earlier heroes, whose glorious way of meeting the difficulties of their own time affords the best encouragement to their successors to encounter the difficulties of another.

The remainder of Admiral Blake's great story is soon told. After his triumph at Santa Cruz he returned at once to the coast of Spain. His spirit was as high as ever, though death was in his face; and he ran over to Salee on the Morocco coast to conclude negotiations with the dusky pirates and set the captives of Christendom free. He was completely successful in his object, and he now made for home. The honours he had won by his late expedition, the thanks of Parliament, the jewel sent him, the letter of Cromwell, came to him while still afloat. He crossed the Bay of Biscay, getting worse and worse every hour. By the time England was in sight he was on his death-bed in his cabin, and it was just as his ship sailed into Plymouth Sound, and there rose before the eyes of his shipmates the well-known scenes of the finest of English sea-ports, that his high and pure spirit passed away. It was the autumn of 1657, when he was just entering on his sixtieth year.

His

His obsequies were worthy of his nation and his fame. body, embalmed, and cased in lead, was carried by sea to Greenwich, and lay in state on the spot where the present noble hospital shelters the veterans who fought in the last naval war under men like himself. His long funeral procession, barges

and

and banners, admirals and generals, all the great state officers of a great and stirring yet pious and reverent age, passed up the river on the 4th of September. At Westminster, salvoes of artillery received it; and heralds were in attendance to marshal the line in conformity with the traditions of earlier ceremonies in honour of earlier heroes. His remains were then laid in a vault in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, in the old Abbey; and one of the simplest, bravest, truest of all English captains was handed over to history and to a posterity which, if it understands its own interests, will never let such memories die. At the Restoration, his corpse was taken out of its place of honour, and, says Mr. Dixon, cast into a pit.' But though it was certainly removed from the Chapel of Henry the Seventh, it is not so certain that it was treated with the indecency which our biographer reprehends. Other writers of credit represent the remains as having been simply transferred to the Abbey yard. To whatever situation his dust was consigned, it rests in peace; and England, juster to his renown than was possible in the hour of retaliation to the heated spirits of that age, numbers him among her greatest naval heroes.

ART. II.-History of Civilization in England. By Henry Thomas Buckle. Vol. I. London, 1857.

THE

HE present volume is the first instalment of a work whose modest pretensions are no less than to be the Novum Organum of historical and social science. According to the writer, all that has hitherto been presented to the world as history must be rejected as worthless, and all the conclusions at which divines, philosophers, and statesmen have been arriving for the last two thousand years may be put aside as worse than useless. Religion has been a marplot, government a blunder, and literature foolishness. All existing histories, having for the most part been written by ecclesiastics or persons engaged in politics or letters, partake of the necessary ignorance of their writers and the imbecility of their pursuits, and are of less value than the old almanacs to which they have been sometimes likened. These petty special occupations lead to prejudice, and prevent their professors from being able historians. Only the man who knows nothing in particular, but everything in general, is qualified to instruct mankind as a writer of history. Such men may be rare, but Mr. Buckle, in his own estimate of himself, is one of them, and he undertakes the task accordingly.

The volume has the somewhat unusual prefix of a list, extending

to

to fifteen pages, of the authors quoted in the body of the work, forming, as may be presumed, a portion of the catalogue of the writer's library. It comprises many books, the relevancy of which to the matter in hand is not at first sight apparent. It omits some, of which the absence, in a work professing to survey all that has been done in physical and metaphysical science, is remarkable. Neither Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, or La Place, if they rest upon Mr. Buckle's shelves, appear ever to have been taken down from them, and their labours do not figure in the vast parade of authorities who are made to usher into public notice the first volume of Mr. Buckle's first work.

This first volume is, however, only a portion, not of the work itself 'The History of Civilization in England'-but of the Introduction to it, treating of the method in which history should be written. It commences by an examination of the resources available for the investigation of history, and by an attempt to prove the necessary sequence of all human actions, which actions are said to be governed by mental and physical laws, both of which he maintains must be studied, and that there can be no history without the natural sciences. An instance is very soon encountered of the way in which Mr. Buckle is in the habit of proving his case, namely, by the simple and easy process of not proving it at all, but of assuming it either as proved, or as not wanting proof; and then comfortably proceeding as if everything had been established by the soundest logic and the plainest facts. The following sentence occurs:

'The most celebrated historians are manifestly inferior to the most successful cultivators of physical science: no one having devoted himself to history who in point of intellect is at all to be compared with Kepler, Newton, or many others that might be named.'-(p. 7.)

In this manner, by a bare assertion, the comparative capacity of all the historians from Herodotus to Macaulay is quietly disposed of. How would the case have stood if Kepler had devoted himself to history? The difference would have been not in the man, but in the subject, and he would at once have become, on Mr. Buckle's easy system of demonstration, manifestly inferior.' How does it stand with Bacon (degraded to a note), of whom Mr. Buckle chooses to say that he wrote history, only as a subordinate object, and that it evidently cost him nothing like the thought which he devoted to other subjects.'

This manifestly' and this 'evidently' are favourite substitutes for argument throughout the volume, and the reader must always

be