Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain,
And half of the rest of us maim'd for life

In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife;

And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold,

And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent ;

And the masts and the rigging were lying over the

side;

But Sir Richard cried in his English pride,

'We have fought such a fight for a day and a night As may never be fought again!

We have won great glory, my men!

And a day less or more

At sea or ashore,

We die-does it matter when?

Sink me the ship, Master Gunner-sink her, split her in twain !

Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain !'

XII.

And the gunner said 'Ay, ay,' but the seamen made

reply:

'We have children, we have wives,

And the Lord hath spared our lives.

We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to

let us go;

We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow.'

And the lion there lay dying, and they yielded to the

foe.

XIII.

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,

Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,

And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace;

But he rose upon their decks, and he cried :

'I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;

I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do: With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die! And he fell upon their decks, and he died.

XIV.

And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true,

And had holden the power and glory of Spain so

cheap

That he dared her with one little ship and his English few;

Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew,

But they sank his body with honour down into the deep,

6

And they mann'd the Revenge' with a swarthier

alien crew,

And away she sail'd with her loss and long'd for her own;

When a wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from sleep,

And the water began to heave and the weather to

moan,

And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew, And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,

Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,

And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shotshatter'd navy of Spain,

And the little 'Revenge' herself went down by the island crags

To be lost evermore in the main.

ALFRED TENNYSON,

AND

ENGLAND AS A MILITARY POWER IN 1854 AND IN 1878.

WHEN a house in your neighbourhood is on fire, it is high time to look to your water-supply, and to ascertain the condition of your perhaps hitherto neglected fire-engine. If that is out of order, your only resource is to patch it up as best you can to meet the immediate emergency; but as soon as the danger is over, some trifling or unexpected accident having perchance saved your property from destruction-unless, indeed, you are a recklessly unthrifty and unbusinesslike householder-you will lose no time in taking precautions against any future recurrence of such a danger. The man who has had a warning of that nature and failed to benefit by it, meets with no sympathy when, a few years later, nothing of his house remains to him but some smoking ruins.

What holds good with individuals may be appropriately applied to nations also. England has had many warnings and several hairbreadth escapes from calamity, but we have learned experience from none. We can only be saved from the fire of war-the greatest of all scourges-by our national fire-engines, the army and the navy. When danger approaches we realise this, but during a spell of profound peace we laugh at the dangers we have escaped, and we scoff at those which foreseeing men tell us may be in store for us. We take the advice of medical men upon sanitary subjects; we follow their recommendations to protect us from epidemics; to guard ourselves, or those who are to come after us, against injury arising from ill-constructed wills, leases, or other legal documents, we employ the best lawyer we can afford to pay; and, lest our house should tumble about our heads, we build in accordance with the advice of an experienced architect. When danger is upon us, when an angry country insists upon our ministry vindicating its insulted honour by force of arms, the soldier is sent for and his opinion requested, but until then his views are decried as foolish, and the warnings he dares to utter are neglected with undisguised scorn. We never tire in advertising ourselves as an eminently practical people; as individuals or as commercial companies we insure our lives, our ships, our houses, &c., against various risks, but as a nation we take no trouble to insure our empire against disasters of the most serious nature. The Duke

of Wellington in his day, with all the weight of his renown, was unable to convince the English people of the terrible dangers to which the country was then exposed, and all the best of our soldiers since his time have been equally unsuccessful. As a rule we have been content to patch up our fire-engine in a temporary and, I may add, in a most ineffective manner upon each occasion when our neighbour's property was in flames; but no sooner has the fire been put out, even although it had, we know, ruined our friend before it was got under, than we put back our engine into its former restingplace, taking no trouble to remedy the defects which a practical trial of it had brought to light. Lord Palmerston alone of all our recent ministers, it would seem, was alive to England's danger, and, thanks to him, the Thames and our principal dockyards are now safe against a coup-de-main. The heart of our empire may now be said to be tolerably safe, but how about our extremities? Our commerce, we boast, covers the globe, but to protect it in distant seas our ships of war must practically encircle our sphere also. Our fleet is now propelled by steam, so it cannot keep the sea unless we have coaling stations in every ocean. But unless these coaling places are fortified they can be of no use during war. Year after year the vital importance of erecting works to protect those stations has been urged by soldiers upon successive administrations, both officially and in the press, but still they remain at the mercy of the first enemy's ironclad that reaches them.

war.

1

To illustrate our present unfortunate position I have only to tellthe following story. When the Czar's army crossed the Pruth last year, his ironclad squadron, which happened to be in European waters, was despatched to America, evidently in the first instance to get it away from our fleet in the event of England's having declared Let us consider what that insignificant squadron might have done against us. Being kept ready coaled and prepared for sea, as soon as the telegraph announced the declaration of war it would most probably have started for St. Helena, picking up some of our finest West India and South America steamers en route. Upon arrival at St. Helena it would most likely have found there one of the small English wooden war-vessels belonging to our West Coast of Africa squadron. Such a vessel would of course have fallen an easy prey to the Russians, who, filling up with coal, burning all they could not carry away, and, having taken from Jamestown as much money as it could pay to save it from destruction, would steam for Simon's Bay, where the same performance would be gone through. There we have a small dockyard establishment, and almost always one or two wooden war-vessels. All would be destroyed as well as every coal store in Cape Town; every merchantman in Table Bay-and there is always a large quantity of shipping there-would be captured, and most probably burnt. This game would then be repeated at the Mauritius