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The fame of his exploit lived long in the land, and at least a dozen years later Hogarth painted a one-eyed sailor with six bits of tobacco pipe before him, showing a barber in a pothouse how Portobello was won.

We possessed no real national song of the sea until James Thomson received a commission to write words for a musical medley at the Prince of The result Wales's private theatre.1

was "Rule, Britannia," set to music by Arne, and touched up afterwards by Lord Bolingbroke. So the watchword song of Britons all over the earth was written to the order of a prince who had no English sympathies, and whose nautical knowledge was bounded by trips from Whitehall to Twickenham, in company with pretty ambassadresses. Not much later appeared "Hearts of Oak," rugged and homely lines, instinct with fine national sentiment, and thoroughly attune with the sailor's sympathies. It is a fitting song for the lips of a Viking crew sailing south, and laughing at the thought of defeat, and is to be admired the more as the production of no sea-nurtured poet, but of a drawing-room darling, a prince of the stage, David Garrick. An equally fine piece is "The Storm," by Falconer of Leith, whose opening lines strike the

1 At Cliefden, in Buckinghamshire, on the 1st of August, 1740.

keynote of one of the most stirring sea staves ever penned:

Cease, rude Boreas, blust'ring railer!
List, ye landsmen, all to me!
Messmates, hear a brother sailor
Sing the dangers of the sea!

A few years afterwards the very popular "Bay of Biscay O" was produced by Andrew Cherry, and the coarse "Old Commodore," by Mark Lonsdale; while it is to Cowper that we owe the fine lament on "The loss of the Royal George," and the gloomy ballad of "The Castaway," with its personal allegory underlying an incident in Anson's voyage to the Horn. The former of these pieces is worthy of a place next "Hohenlinden," and makes us regret that the patriotic haretaming poet was not a dweller by the With his chafing spirit craving for excitement, Cowper surely would have made no contemptible ocean poet, though it may be difficult to identify the bard of "loud hissing urns," and tea-cups and sofas, with the singer of Kempenfelt's sad dirge.

sea.

Just in the nick of time, at the outburst of enthusiasm which greeted the French war, came one with songs of dare-devil courage, rollicking humor and tender pathos. In 1745 was born Charles Dibdin, Tyrtæus of our fleet, the Allan Ramsay of the shepherds of the sea, whose fame has mocked at the vicious onslaughts of Lord Jeffrey, in whose judgment the songs of the sailor's laureate were mere ebullitions of slang.

Dibdin's influence upon the navy, as all men know, has not been unchallenged. Some have dubbed him a charlatan, and have declared that by his songs he has never given a sailor to the service. Captain Chamier, however, the author of "Ben Brace," thought otherwise, when he asserted that Eng. land can never pay her debt to Dibdin, whose songs breathe the very inspira

tion that our seamen need.

Herman Melville, too, in "The White Jacket," declares that notwithstanding their savor of fatalism, his verses "breathe the very poetry of ocean." The truth is that Dibdin drew an idealized picture of a sailor's life and character, at a time when the blood of the country was at fever heat after a series of unparalleled victories; when a prince of the blood trod the quarter deck, and Nelson was hailed as the god of war. Anxious to "point a moral and adorn a tale," he cared little for strict adherence to technical truth; since his songs were sung as much on land as at sea, everybody knew them, and found in them an attractive mirror of "a life on the ocean wave."

His contemporaries did not know, as we know, that while the poet grossly exaggerated both the virtues and vices of sailors, his heroes were no more fair types of the real live British tar than was Fenimore Cooper's Chingachcook or Leather-stocking a type of the red man and the trapper of North America. Pitt, however, regarded him as a useful recruiting officer, and we may suppose that many an emotional landsman of tender age succumbed to the powerful influence of his verse. The need of men at this time was sore and constant.

Everybody was possessed by the wholesome conviction that upon the navy alone depended safety from invasion. And yet ships of war went to sea in nine cases of ten undermanned, notwithstanding the merciless razzias of the press-gangs. There was need of a poet to soften realities. Tyranny and injustice went hand in hand with a terribly hard discipline; a hundred years ago a sailor's life was a difficult and bitter thing; and the pen of Dibdin was just the instrument needed to stir a

2 Captain Griffiths, R.N., in a pamphlet published in 1829 "On the Abolition of Impressment," wrote, "In the whole of our service we

feeling of enthusiastic pride in the navy and to impress the British public with a notion that life on board a man-o'-war was the most enviable state of existence possible.

Dibdin, who was no slave to an overexacting conscience, was petted by ministers and encouraged to write glowing songs in praise of the fleet; wherefore he wrote and failed not of his reward in the shape of a temporary pension. The popularity of some of his songs has but little declined, while Jack's hardships, of which they make no mention, are now to be found only on the pages of fiction. Mutatis mutandis, the colors in which Dibdin painted a sailor's life afloat are as true at the end of this century as they were false at its beginning.

Though the surroundings and treatment of our bluejackets are to-day very different, the men themselves have changed so little both in esprit de corps and professional peculiarities of thought, word and deed that Dibdin's stock beau idéal of a seaman remains what it was, intensely melodramatic and hopelessly unreal. Among other faults in his songs we note their frequent coarseness, their exuberance of nautical technicalities (with which, as a matter of fact, no one but a Commodore Trunnion ever interlarded his speech), and his glaring errors in the use of common sea terms. An amusing example of his inaccuracy is seen in the original edition (since amended) of his "Poor Jack," in which he wrote:

For, says he, do you mind

me, let storms e'er so oft Take the top-lifts of sailors aback;

from which it is pretty clear that he regarded "top-lifts" and "top-sails" as synonymous terms. Again, in "The

can hardly recount half a dozen bona fide volunteers."

Greenwich Pensioner," set to the old air of "The Plough Boy," occurs the phrase:

er.

That time, bound straight to Portugal, by Right fore and aft we bore.

And in "Jack in his Element" he perpetrated:

The flowing sails we tars unbend To lead a roving life,

In every man we find a friend, In every port a wife.

A yet more absurd slip is in the "Flowing Can:"

The cadge to weigh,

The sheet belay,

He does it with a wish; To heave the lead,

Or to cat-head

The pond'rous anchor fish.

It is superfluous to object that to "fish" the anchor to the cat-head would be an act of no less egregious folly than an attempt to cat-head the fish.

The sentimentality of Dibdin led him now and again to singular freaks of fancy. In his ballad of "Ben Backstay," wherein the sailor is said to brave "for the love of Anna" the frightful storm, it is also stated that he "thought of Anna, sigh'd and died," and that he wore her miniature round his neck. The idea is sufficiently amusing of a tarry topman mournfully contemplating the effigy of his only love during the progress of a gale. We fancy that he would far more likely have been found tattooed from top to toe with a portrait gallery of the loves which literally were too often but skin deep. Fanny on his larboard leg, as blue as powder and indigo could make her; Betsy on his breast, and Susan on his starboard arm, with clasped hands and coupled hearts galore.

Reversing the medal, let us give Dib

his due as an admirable song writ

Inimitable in his own line and without a worthy rival, even the most trifling of his ditties are characterized by a manly earnestness, and if marred meretricious sentimentality are bright with a hundred touches of unaffected pathos. Singing ever in praise of duty and patriotism, he exalts also such qualities as valor, self-reliance, endurance, mercy and resignation. Perhaps he would have been a greater man if he had written less; for while we admire his genius and his choice of themes, we are of opinion that most of his thirteen hundred songs might be burnt to morrow without any serious loss either to literature in general or to his own fame in particular.

His best do not number a score. Who can read "Poor Tom Bowling," written on the occasion of his brother's death, without feeling the influence of its pathetic simplicity and felicitous ten-derness? Words, sentiment and melody (for Dibdin was no mean musician) are all in perfect keeping, and the result is a song that will last as long as England does. Of his other serious pieces we give highest place to "The Shipwreck," a composition in which Dibdin rises to a loftier plane of poetic feeling, and a higher elevation of tone, than in most of his other lyrics. The conception is dramatic, the incidents are natural and correctly detailed, with the aid of vivid and appropriate imagery.

It is especially as the writer, not of one only, but of a series of worthy sea songs that Charles Dibdin stands alone in the gallery of British poets. "The Arethusa," with its delightful colloquy between the skipper of the saucy frigate and the Frenchman on La Belle Poule, a song which our grandfathers often listened to from the lips of Incledon, was written by Prince Hoare, an Irishman, who never wrote anything else half so good. "Harry Bluff," an anonymous ditty, was immensely pop

ular at one time, and is not unworthy of Dibdin himself:

The foe thought he'd struck, when he

cried out "Avast,"

And the colors of Old England he nailed to the mast,

And he died like a true British sailor!

Equally good of its class, though too artificial in sentiment for a true song of the sea, is Barry Cornwall's "The Sea." Its literary merit accounts for its popularity; but it lacks a salt-water odor, and savors of Cockneydom rather than of norwesters. Put it alongside one of Dibdin's, and you see how unreal it is, simply because it is descriptive rather than dramatic, and teems with images that would never enter the mind of a sailor. It is a poet's song, but not the song of a sea poet, and probably no seaman has ever sung it. Although the poet aver that

If a storm should come and awake the deep,

What matter? I shall ride and sleep,

we honestly do not believe him, notwithstanding his further assurance that he has lived "full fifty summers a rover's life."

Redolent far more of blue water is Allan Cunninghame's "A wet sheet and a flowing sea," which, though marred by faulty nautical expressions, is a wholesome and spirited song, little, if at all, inferior to Barry Cornwall's. Cunninghame was, in fact, about the strongest of Dibdin's rivals. The Eng. lishman's most racy staves are after all but the songs of impressed alongshore men, while the Scot sings of Vikings and sea rovers, the Robin Hoods of ocean, who counted piracy a thing of honor. Dibdin's jolly mariner, with a pocket full of prize money, and keeping up his acquaintance with blue wa ter all in the way of business, has little in common with the sea robber

watching for his victim in some sheltered cove or wave-worn cavern, in love with the stress of storm, and claiming kinship with the guiding stars. It is curious to note that "honest Allan❞ seems to have shared the opinion of every landsman that a "sheet" is a sail, though the loblolly boy in any herring-man could have put him right. Nor did he disdain to assert an impossible thing when he sang of a ship sailing from an English port and leaving "England on the lee," as "the billow follows free," in ignorance of the fact that to perform such a feat the vessel must be on a wind, and that "on a lee" is an expression unknown to seafaring men. Wherefore it was not judicious on part of Cunninghame to come down on Dibdin for his ignorance of ships and sailors' speech. As a matter of fact very few sea lyrics have been penned by practical seamen, and fewer still are free from error. Among such are those by Falconer and John Macken, author of "The Harp and the Desert," who, under the pseudonym of Ismael Fitzadam, acquired notoriety some seventy years ago. By birth and education an Irish gentleman, by nature a poet, Macken served on board a King's ship in the Mediterranean under Exmouth, and wrote a long description of the bombardment of Algiers. Subsequently, he died broken-hearted, unable to obtain from the government any recognition of the efforts of his muse. Scarcely less pitiable was the fate of Thomas Dibdin, who, overshadowed by the fame of his father, "lived neglected and died forlorn." Though he was the author of such sterling favorites as "The right little, tight little island," "When Vulcan forged the bolts of Jove," and "All's Well," his contemporaries denied him bread, nor has posterity given him so much as a stone.

As a writer of songs we may set Charles Dibdin not far from Burns and

Béranger and Tom Moore. Had he been a daintier versifier his influence would have been less, for no truly poetic song has ever yet become widely popular. The secret of his power is to be found in an easy flow of versification, a keen perception of character, and a power of drawing it with intense realism. He has a thick brush and a heavy touch, but the likeness stands out sharp and clear, and from Sheerness to Shanghai Jack recognizes his messmate. He tunes his lyre to every mood of the sailor, and is as much at home in a pæan over a vanquished "Master Brueys" or Van Tromp, as in a lament over the absence of "lovely Nan."

In conclusion it occurs to us to ask, What were our real poets about, while a legion of poetasters, vastly inferior to Dibdin, were pouring out sea staves, good, bad and indifferent? Why did Scott never write a song of the sea, or Wilson, a brother Tory of the deepest dye, or Southey, staunch adherent of Church and King? It was left for young Thomas Campbell to write "Ye Mariners of England" and "The Battle of the Baltic," two of the noblest lyrics ever penned in praise of seamen. Temple Bar.

Equally strange is it that so few d England's great naval victories should have roused the hearts of our poets to song. Charles Dibdin failed in the only two efforts to which they moved him, and Trafalgar and the death of Nelson were left to the tender mercies of hired rhymesters.

We fear that the age of sea songs is past. Such nautical ditties as have in our day flowed from the pens of balladmongers are cast in a different mould There is little to be said in praise of the fin de siècle people's poet, who is content to chant the praises of the Old Kent Road, and to recount in shambling doggerel the kitchen-cupboard loves of cook and constable, or the coing of barmaids and beer-bemused "Johnnies." "Annie Laurie" does now-a-days just as well for the fore castle as anything else. Such inanities as "Tarara-boom-de-ay" have found a home in the hearts of men whose grandsires sang over bowls of "flip" songs that are now heard only as lisped by wooden-throated tenors at a penny reading. You may write a song for a sailor, but you cannot make him sing it.

Alan Walters.

IV.

A HEAD BY HELLEU.*

(Conclusion.)

They had finished their dinner and were now going, as he had told his mother, to the theatre. Previous to this they had only gone to the matinee, because Lisbeth had to return punctually. But to-day she could not oppose his wishes. But when she anxious

* Translated for The Living Age by Adene Williams.

ly said that she hoped none of his acquaintances would see her there, he answered almost roughly: "That will do no harm, they ought to see you."

And there they sat in the parquet, in the clear blaze of light, among gaily dressed people. And she in her black woollen dress.

To-night it was an opera, "The Magic Flute." As she asked him what it meant, he said: "Oh, that is only an

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