as I was sensible these reflections would answer no end, they did not last long. I got up, and marking a great tree, I there deposited my load, not being able to carry it any farther;" and then"The hardy tar pursued,

Pale, but intrepid, sad, but unsubdued."

After some hours he rejoined his companions; but, struck to the heart by their total want of compassion for his disaster, and by their reproaches for the loss of his burden, "I got up," he says, "and struck into the wood, and walked back at least five miles to the tree I had marked, and returned just in time to deliver it before my companions embarked with the Indians upon a great lake."

This zeal however won him very little favour from the Indians, to whom he had thus returned. They forbade his embarking with them, and left him to "wait for some other Indians," not even leaving a morsel of the putrid seal which he had suffered so much for. How much is contained in his simple words :-“I was left alone upon the beach, and night was at hand ** I kept my eyes upon the boat as long as I could distinguish them, and then returned into the wood, and sat myself down upon the root of a tree, having eat nothing the whole day but the stem of a plant **Quite worn out with fatigue, I soon fell asleep."

He was saved by some Indians. He travelled northward with them, but they gave him scarce any food or shelter. One dark night he slept alone on the beach half in the water, until awakened in agonies of cramp. At last, having again met the captain and officers, and passed

"O'er many a cliff sublime, He found a warmer world, a milder clime."

The wanderers were now Spanish prisoners of war, and thrown into a condemned hole, containing nothing but a heap of lime, swarming with fleas. Whilst here they suffered from a dreadful shock of an earthquake. But at last, in St Jago, the four who remained of the crew of the Wager found

"A home to rest, a shelter to defend ;

Peace and repose, a Briton and a friend;"

this friend being a good Scotch physician, who kept them two years in his house, and treated them as brothers. The prisoners were now put on board a French vessel, and, after more adventures, Byron lived to receive the joyful welcome of his family in England.-Stories from History.'

1. Mermaid is a hybrid word. Mer being from the French, and maid, English. It denotes the sea-woman of fable and poetry, being said to resemble a woman in the upper parts of the body,

and a fish in the lower part. The mail is called merman.

2. Quagmire, this is quake-mire, soft wet land, which has a surface firm enough to bear a person, but which shakes or yields under the feet.

COMMODORE BYRON.

FRIEND of the brave! in peril's darkest hour,
Intrepid Virtue looks to thee for power;
To thee the heart its trembling homage yields
On stormy floods and carnage-covered fields,
When front to front the bannered hosts combine,
Halt ere they close, and form the dreadful line.
When all is still on Death's devoted soil,
The march-worn soldier mingles for the toil!
As rings his glittering tube, he lifts on high
The dauntless brow, and spirit-speaking eye,
Hails in his heart the triumph yet to come,
And hears thy stormy music in the drum!
And such thy strength-inspiring aid that bore
The hardy Byron to his native shore-
In horrid climes, where Chiloe's tempests sweep
Tumultuous murmurs o'er the troubled deep;
"Twas his to mourn Misfortune's rudest shock,
Scourged by the winds, and cradled on the rock,
To wake each joyless morn and search again
The famished haunts of solitary men ;
Whose race, unyielding as their storm,
Knew not a trace of Nature but the form;
Yet, at thy call, the hardy tar pursued,
Pale, but intrepid, sad, but unsubdued,
Pierced the deep woods, and hailing from afar
The moon's pale planet and the northern star,
Paused at each dreary cry unheard before,
Hyænas in the wild, and mermaids on the shore;
Till, led by thee, o'er, many a cliff sublime,
He found a warmer world, a milder clime,
A home to rest, a shelter to defend,
Peace and repose, a Briton and a friend!

CAMPBELL.

Conference.
Fragments.

A DREARY NIGHT AT SEA.

Region.
Vibration.

Incessant.
Clamorous.

Constancy.
Unfathomable.

A DARK and dreary night; the people nestling in their beds or circling late about the fire; Want, colder than Charity, shivering at the street corners; church-towers humming with the faint vibration of their own tongues, but newly resting from the ghostly preachment, 'One!' The earth covered with a sable pall as for

broadsides. Some of the new men-of-war, indeed, were so rotten that, unless speedily repaired, they would go down at their moorings. The sailors were paid with so little punctuality that they were glad to find some usurer who would purchase their tickets at forty per cent. discount. The commanders who had not powerful friends at court were even worse treated. Some officers, to whom large arrears were due, after vainly importuning the government during many years, had died for want of a morsel of bread.

Most of the ships which were afloat were commanded by men who had not been bred to the sea. This, it is true, was not an abuse introduced by the government of Charles. No state, ancient or modern, had before that time made a complete separation between the naval and military services. In the great civilized nations of the old world, Cimon and Lysander, Pompey and Agrippa, had fought battles by sea as well as by land. Nor had the impulse which nautical science received at the close of the fifteenth century produced any material improvement in the division of labour. At Flodden the right wing of the victorious army was led by the admiral of England. At Jarnac and Moncontour the Huguenot ranks were marshalled by the Admiral of France. Neither John of Austria, the conqueror of Lepanto, nor Lord Howard of Effingham, to whose direction the marine of England was entrusted when the Spanish invaders were approaching our shores, had received the education of a sailor. Raleigh, highly celebrated as a naval commander, had served during many years as a soldier in France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. Blake had distinguished himself by his skilful and valiant defence of an inland town before he humbled the pride of Holland and of Castile on the ocean. Since the Restoration, the same system had been followed. Great fleets had been entrusted to Rupert and Monk; Rupert, who was renowned chiefly as a hot and daring cavalry officer, and Monk, who, when he wanted his ship to tack to larboard, moved the mirth of his crew by calling out" Wheel to the left!"

But about this time wise men began to perceive that the rapid improvement, both of the art of war and of the art of navigation, made it necessary to draw a line between two professions which had hitherto been confounded. Either the command of a regiment or the command of a ship was now a matter quite sufficient to occupy the attention of a single mind. In the year 1672 the French government determined to educate young men of good family from a very early age specially for the sea service. But the English government, instead of following this excellent example, not only continued to distribute high naval commands

among landsmen, but selected for such commands landsmen who, even on land, could not safely have been put in any important trust. Any lad of noble birth, any dissolute courtier for whom one of the king's mistresses would speak a word, might hope that a ship of the line, and with it the honour of the country and the lives of hundreds of brave men, would be committed to his care. It mattered not that he had never in his life taken a voyage except on the Thames; that he could not keep his feet in a breeze; that he did not know the difference between latitude and longitude. No previous training was thought necessary, or at most he was sent to make a short trip in a man-of-war, where he was subjected to no discipline, where he was treated with marked respect, and where he lived in a round of revels and amusements. If in the intervals of feasting, drinking, and gambling, he succeeded in learning the meaning of a few technical phrases and the names of the points of the compass, he was fully qualified to take charge of a three-decker.

This is no imaginary description. In 1666, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, at seventeen years of age, volunteered to serve at sea against the Dutch. He passed six weeks on board, diverting himself, as well as he could, in the society of some young libertines of rank, and then returned home to take the command of a troop of horse. After this he was never on the water till the year 1672, when he again joined the fleet, and was almost immediately appointed captain of a ship of eighty-four guns, reputed the finest in the navy. He was then twenty-three years old, and had not, in the whole course of his life, been three months afloat. As soon as he came back from sea he was made colonel of a regiment of foot. This is a specimen of the manner in which naval commands of the highest importance were then given; and a favourable specimen: for Mulgrave, though he wanted experience, wanted neither parts nor courage. Others were promoted in the same way who not only were not good officers, but who were intellectually and morally incapable of ever becoming good officers, and whose only recommendation was that they had been ruined by folly and vice.

The chief bait which allured these men into the service was the profit of conveying bullion and other valuable commodities from port to port; for both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were then so much infested by pirates from Barbary, that merchants were not willing to trust precious cargoes to any custody but that of a man-of-war. A captain in this way sometimes cleared several thousands of pounds by a short voyage, and for this lucrative business he too often neglected the interests of his country and the honour of his flag, made mean submissions

to foreign powers, disobeyed the most direct injunctions of his superiors, lay in port when he was ordered to chase a Sallee rover, or ran with dollars to Leghorn when his instructions directed him to repair to Lisbon. And all this he did with impunity. The same interest which had placed him in a post for which he was unfit, maintained him there. No admiral, bearded by these corrupt and dissolute minions of the palace, dared to do more than mutter something about a court martial. If any officer showed a higher sense of duty than his fellows, he soon found he lost money without acquiring honour. One captain, who, by strictly obeying the orders of the admiralty, missed a cargo which would have been worth four thousand pounds to him, was told by Charles, with ignoble levity, that he was a great fool for his pains.

The discipline of the navy was of a piece throughout. As the courtly captain despised the admiralty, he was in turn despised by his crew. It could not be concealed that he was inferior in seamanship to every foremast-man on board. It was idle to expect that old sailors, familiar with the hurricanes of the tropics and with the icebergs of the Arctic Circle, would pay prompt and respectful obedience to a chief who knew no more of winds and waves than could be learned in a gilded barge between Whitehall Stairs and Hampton Court. To trust such a novice with the working of a ship was evidently impossible.

The direction of the navigation was therefore taken from the captain and given to the master, but this partition of authority produced innumerable inconveniences. The line of demarcation was not, and perhaps could not be drawn with precision. There was therefore constant wrangling. The captain, confident in proportion to his ignorance, treated the master with lordly contempt. The master, well aware of the danger of disobliging the powerful, too often, after a struggle, yielded against his better judgment; and it was well if the loss of ship and crew was not the consequence. In general the least mischievous of the aristocratical captains were those who completely abandoned to others the direction of their vessels, and thought only of making money and spending it. The way in which these men lived was so ostentatious and voluptuous, that, greedy as they were of gain, they seldom became rich. They dressed as if for a gala at Versailles, ate off plate, drank the richest wines, and kept harems on board, while hunger and scurvy raged among the crew, and while corpses were daily flung out of the portholes.

Such was the ordinary character of those who were then called gentlemen captains. Mingled with them were to be found, happily for our country, naval commanders of a very different description,