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bows, and chain-pumps clanging, and whole cataracts of water gushing from them, clear white jets spouting from all the scuppers, fore and aft. She made the signal to close. It was answered. The next, alas! was the British ensign, seized, union down in the main rigging, the signal of the uttermost distress. Still we all bowled along together, but her yards were not squared, nor her sails set with her customary precision, and her lurches became more and more sickening, until at length she rolled so heavily, that she dipped both yardarms alternately in the water, and reeled to and fro like a drunken man.

"What is that splash?'

"It was the larboard bow eight een-pound gun hove overboard, and watching the roll, the whole broadside, one after another, were cast into the sea. The clang of the chainpumps increased, the water rushed in at one side of the main-deck, and out at the other, in absolute cascades from the ports. At this moment the whole fleet of boats were alongside, keeping way with the ship, in the light breeze. Her maintopsail was hove aback, while the captain's voice resounded through the ship.

"Now, men-all hands-bags, and hammocks-starboard, watch the starboard side-larboard, watch the larboard side-no rushing nowshe will swim this hour to come.'

"The bags, and hammocks, and officers' kits, were handed into the boats; the men were told off over the side, as quietly by watches as if at muster, the officers last. At length the first lieutenant came over the side. By this time she was settling down perceptibly in the water; the old captain stood upon the gangway, holding by the iron stancheon, and, taking off his hat, stood uncovered for a moment, and with the tears standing in his eyes. He then replaced it, descended, and took his place in the ship's launch-the last man to leave the ship; and there was little time to spare, for we had scarcely shoved off a few yards, to clear the spars of the wreck, when she sended forward, heavily, and sickly, on the long swell.-She never rose to the opposite heave of the sea, but gradually sank by the head. The hull disappeared slowly and digni

fiedly, the ensign fluttered and vanished beneath the dark ocean-I could have fancied reluctantly, as if it had been drawn down through a trap-door. The topsails next disappeared, the foretopsail sinking fastest; and last of all, the white pennant at the maintopgallant mast head, after flickering and struggling in the wind, flew up as if imbued with life, like a stream of white fire, in the setting sun, and was then drawn down into the abyss, and the last vestige of the Rayo vanished for ever. The crew, as if moved by one common impulse, gave three cheers.

"The Captain now stood up in his boat- Men, the Rayo is no more, but it is my duty to tell you, that although you are now to be distributed amongst the transports, you are still amenable to martial law; I am aware, men, this hint may not be necessary, still it is right you should know it.'

"Our ship, immediately after the frigate's crew had been bestowed, and the boats got in, hoisted the Commodore's light, and the following morning we fell in with the Torch, off the east end of Jamaica, which, after seeing the transports safe into Kingston, and taking out me and my people, bore up through the Gulf, and resumed her cruising ground on the edge of the Gulf stream, between 25 and 30 north latitude."

"And what follows this," said Massa Aaron, "for the roll is done?" "Oh," said I," we then stood away to the northward, and finally resumed our cruizing ground off Bermuda; there is the next log," said I, chucking another paper book to him. "Ah," said Bang, Scene off Bermuda,' Cruize of the Torch,' and so forth. All very fine and moving no doubt, but we shall take them by and by. But, Thomas, it must have been a very lamencholy affair that said evanishing of the Rayo."

"It was," I answered.

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would-be half smartness, half buffoonery; tell me what took place." "Why, my dear sir, you are awfully dictatorial; but I will tell you, when the old Rayo clipped out of sight, there was not a dry eye in the whole fleet. There she goes, the dear old beauty,' said one of her crew. "There goes the blessed old black b-tch,' quoth another. 'Ah, many a merry night have we had in the clever little craft,' quoth a third; and there was really a tolerable shedding of tears, and squirting of tobacco juice. But the blue ripple had scarcely blown over the glasslike surface of the sea where she had sunk, when the buoyancy of young hearts, with the prospect of a good furlough amongst the lobster boxes for a time, seemed to be uppermost amongst the men. The officers, I saw and knew, felt very differently.

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My eye!' sung out an old quartermaster in our boat, perched well forward with his back against the ring in the stem, and his arms crossed, after having been busily employed rummaging in his bag, my eye, what a pity-oh, what a pity !'

·

"Come, there is some feeling, genuine, at all events, thought I.

"Why,' said Bill Chesstree, the captain of the foretop,' what is can't be helped, old Fizgig; old Rayo has gone down, and’

"Old Rayo be d—d, Master

Bill,' said the man; but may I be flogged, if I ha'nt forgotten half a pound of negrohead baccy in Dick Catgut's bag.'

"Launch ahoy!' hailed a halfdrunken voice from one of the boats astern of us. Hillo,' responded the coxswain. The poor skipper even pricked up his ears. 'Have you got Dick Catgut's fiddle among ye?' This said Dick Catgut was the corporal of marines, and the prime instigator of all the fun amongst the men. No, no,' said several voices, 'no fiddle here.' The hail passed round among the other boats, No fiddle.' 'I would rather lose three days' grog than have his fiddle mislaid,' quoth the man who pulled the bow oar.

"Why don't you ask Dick himself?' said our coxswain. Alas! poor Dick was nowhere to be found; he had been mislaid as well as his fiddle. He had broken into the spirit room, as it turned out, and having got drunk, did not come to time when the frigate sunk.

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"I was here interrupted by a hail from the look-out man at the masthead, 'Land right-a-head.'

"Thank God," quoth Bang. "What does it look like ?" said I. "It makes in low hummocks, sir. Now I see houses on the highest one."

"Hurrah, Nassau, New Providence, ho!"

THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE.*

PART I.

IT is falsely charged upon itself by this age, in its character of censor morum, that effeminacy in a practical sense lies either amongst its fullblown faults, or amongst its lurking tendencies. A rich, a polished, a refined age, may by mere necessity of inference be presumed to be a luxurious one; and the usual prinIciple, by which moves the whole trivial philosophy which speculates upon the character of a particular age or a particular nation, is first of all to adopt some one central idea of its characteristics, and then without further effort to pursue its integration; that is, having assumed (or, suppose even, having demonstrated) the existence of some great influential quality in excess sufficient to overthrow the apparent equilibrium demanded by the common standards of a just national character, the speculator then proceeds, as in a matter of acknowledged right, to push this predominant quality into all its consequences and all its closest affinities. To give one illustration of such a case, now perhaps beginning to be forgotten: Somewhere about the year 1755, the once célebrated Dr Brown, after other little attempts in literature and paradox, took up the conceit that England was ruined at her heart's core by excess of luxury and sensual self-indulgence. He had persuaded himself that the ancient activities and energies of the country were sapped by long habits of indolence, and by a morbid plethora of enjoyment in every class. Courage, and the old fiery spirit of the people, had gone to wreck with the physical qualities which had sustained them. Even the faults of the public mind had given way under its new complexion of character; ambition and civil dissension were extinct. It was questionable whether a good hearty assault and battery, or a respectable knock-down blow, had been dealt by any man in London for one or two generations. The Doctor carried his reveries so far, that he even satisfied himself

and one or two friends (probably by looking into the Parks at hours propitious to his hypothesis) that horses were seldom or ever used for riding; that, in fact, this accomplishment was too boisterous or too perilous for the gentle propensities of modern Britons; and that, by the best accounts, few men of rank or fashion were now seen on horseback. This pleasant collection of dreams did Doctor Brown solemnly propound to the English public, in two octavo volumes, under the title of " An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times;" and the report of many who lived in those days assures us, that for a brief period the book had a prodigious run. In some respects the Doctor's conceits might seem too startling and extravagant ; but to balance that, every nation has some pleasure in being heartily abused by one of its own number; and the English nation has always had a special delight in being alarmed, and in being clearly convinced, that it is and ought to be on the brink of ruin. With such advantages in the worthy Doctor's favour, he might have kept the field until some newer extravaganza had made his own obsolete—had not one ugly turn in political affairs given so smashing a refutation to his practical conclusions, and called forth so sudden a rebound of public feeling in the very opposite direction, that a bomb-shell descending right through the whole impression of his book, could not more summarily have laid a Chancery" injunction" upon its further sale. This arose under the brilliant administration of the first Mr Pitt; England was suddenly victorious in three quarters of the globe; land and sea echoed to the voice of her triumphs; and the poor Doctor Brown, in the midst of all this hubbub, cut his own throat with his own razor. Whether this dismal catastrophe were exactly due to his mortification as a baffled visionary, whose favourite conceit had suddenly exploded like a rocket into smoke and

History of the Greek Revolution. By Thomas Gordon, F.R.S. In two vols.

Edinburgh: 1833.

stench, is more than we know. But, at all events, the sole memorial of his hypothesis, which now reminds the English reader that it ever existed, is one solitary notice of goodhumoured satire pointed at it by Cowper.* And the possibility of such exceeding folly in a man otherwise of good sense and judgment, not depraved by any brain-fever or enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the vicious process of reasoning applied to such estimates: the Doctor, having taken up one novel idea of the national character, proceeded afterwards by no tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts and phenomena of daily experience, but resolutely developed out of his one idea, all that it appeared analytically to involve; and postulated audaciously as a solemn fact whatsoever could be exhibited in any possible connexion with his one central principle, whether in the way of consequence or of affinity.

Pretty much upon this unhappy Brunonian mode of deducing our national character, it is a very plausible speculation, which has been and will again be chanted, that we, being a luxurious nation, must by force of good logical dependency be liable to many derivative taints and infirmities which ought of necessity to besiege the blood of nations in that predicament. All enterprise and spirit of adventure, all heroism and courting of danger for its own attractions, ought naturally to languish in a generation enervated by early habits of personal indulgence. Doubtless they ought; à priori, it seems strictly demonstrable that such consequences should follow. Upon the purest forms of inference in Barbara or Celarent, it can be shewn satisfactorily, that from all our tainted classes, à fortiori then from our most tainted classes-our men of fashion and of opulent fortunes, no description of animal can possibly arise but poltroons and fainéans. In fact, pretty generally, under the known circumstances of our modern English education and of our social habits, we ought in obedience to all the precognita of our position to

age

shew ourselves rank cowards-yet, in spite of so much excellent logic, the facts are otherwise. No has shewn in its young patricians a more heroic disdain of sedentary ease, none in a martial support of liberty or national independence has so gaily volunteered upon services the most desperate, or shrunk less from martyrdom on the field of battle, whenever there was hope to invite their disinterested exertions, or grandeur enough in the cause to sustain them. Which of us forgets the gallant Mellish, the frank and the generous, who reconciled himself so gaily to the loss of a splendid fortune, and from the very bosom of luxury suddenly precipitated himself upon the hardships of Peninsular warfare? Which of us forgets the adventurous Lee of Lime, whom a princely estate could not detain in early youth from courting perils in Nubia and Abyssinia, nor (immediately upon his return) from almost wooing death as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo? So again of Colonel Evans, who, after losing a fine estate long held out to his hopes, five times over put himself at the head of forlorn hopes. Such cases are memorable, and were conspicuous at the time, from the lustre of wealth and high connexions which surrounded the parties; but many thousand others, in which the sacrifices of personal ease were less noticeable from their narrower scale of splendour, had equal merit for the cheerfulness with which those sacrifices were made.

Here, again, in the person of the author before us, we have another instance of noble and disinterested heroism, which, from the magnitude of the sacrifices that it involved, must place him in the same class as the Mellishes and the Lees. This gallant Scotsman, who was born in 1788, or 1789, lost his father in early life. Inheriting from him a good estate in Aberdeenshire, and one more considerable in Jamaica, he found himself, at the close of a long minority, in the possession of a commanding fortune. Under the vigilant care of a sagacious mother, Mr Gordon received the very

"The inestimable Estimate of Brown."

amplest advantages of a finished education, studying first at the University of Aberdeen, and afterwards for two years at Oxford; whilst he had previously enjoyed as a boy the benefits of a private tutor from Oxford. Whatever might be the immediate result from this careful tuition, Mr Gordon has since completed his own education in the most comprehensive manner, and has carried his accomplishments as a linguist, to a point of rare excellence. Sweden and Portugal excepted, we understand that he has personally visited every country in Europe. He has travelled also in Asiatic Turkey, in Persia, and in Barbary. From this personal residence in foreign countries, we understand that Mr Gordon has obtained an absolute mastery over certain modern languages, especially the French, the Italian, the modern Greek, and the Turkish. Not content, however, with this extensive education, in a literary sense, Mr Gordon thought proper to prepare himself for the part which he meditated in public life, by a second, or military education, in two separate services;-first, in the British, where he served in the Greys, and in the 43d regiment; and subsequently, during the campaign of 1813, as a captain on the Russian staff.

Thus brilliantly accomplished for conferring lustre and benefit upon any cause which he might adopt amongst the many revolutionary movements then continually emerging in Southern Europe, he finally carried the whole weight of his great talents, prudence, and energy, together with the unlimited command of his purse, to the service of Greece in her heroic struggle with the Sultan. At what point his services and his countenance were appreciated by the ruling persons in Greece, will be best collected from the accompanying letter, translated from the original, in modern Greek, addressed to him by the Provisional Government of Greece, in 1822. It will be seen that this official document notices with great sorrow Mr Gordon's absence from Greece, and with some

surprise, as a fact at that time unexplained and mysterious; but the simple explanation of this mystery was, that Mr Gordon had been brought to the very brink of the grave by a contagious fever, at Tripolizza, and that his native air was found essential to his restoration. Subsequently, however, he returned, and rendered the most powerful services to Greece, until the war was brought to a close, as much almost by Turkish exhaustion, as by the armed interference of the three great conquerors of Navarino.

"The Government of Greece to the SIGNOR GORDON, a man worthy of all admiration, and a friend of the Grecians, Health and prosperity.

"It was not possible, most excellent sir, nor was it a thing endurable to the descendants of the Grecians, that they should be deprived any longer of those imprescriptible rights which belong to the inheritance of their birth-rights which a barbarian of a foreign soil, an antichristian tyrant, issuing from the depths of Asia, seized upon with a robber's hand, and lawlessly trampling under foot, administered up to this time the affairs of Greece, after his own lust and will. Needs it was that we, sooner or later, shattering this iron and heavy sceptre, should recover, at the price of life itself, (if that were found necessary) our patrimonial heritage, that thus our people might again be gathered to the family of free and self-legislating states. Moving, then, under such impulses, the people of Greece advanced with one heart, and perfect unanimity of council, against an oppressive despotism, putting their hands to an enterprise beset with difficulties, and hard indeed to be achieved, yet, in our present circumstances, if any one thing in this life, most indispensable. This, then, is the second year which we are passing since we have begun to move in this glorious contest, once again struggling, to all appearance, upon unequal terms, but grasping our enterprise with the right hand

Mr Gordon is privately known to be the translator of the work written by a Turkish minister, "Tchebi Effendi," published in the Appendix to Wilkinson's WalJachia; and frequently referred to by the Quarterly Review, in its notices of Orien

tal affairs.

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