It concerns the endurance,
armament, turning-circle, and inner gear of every ship in the British
Navy--the whole embellished with profile plates. The Teuton approaches
the matter with pagan thoroughness; the Muscovite runs him close; but the
Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the morale, at the present
day, of the British sailorman.
In this, I conceive, he is from time to time aided by the zealous amateur,
though I find very little in his dispositions to show that he relies on
that amateur's hard-won information. There exists--unlike some other
publication, it is not bound in lead boards--a work by one "M. de C.,"
based on the absolutely unadorned performances of one of our well-known
_Acolyte_ type of cruisers. It contains nothing that did not happen. It
covers a period of two days; runs to twenty-seven pages of large type
exclusive of appendices; and carries as many exclamation points as the
average Dumas novel.
I read it with care, from the adorably finished prologue--it is the
disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable
of writing one page of lyric prose--to the eloquent, the joyful, the
impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this
sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at
the mercy of his agent.
"M. de C.," I read, opened his campaign by stowing away in one of her
boats what time H.
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