Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439

Then came his sweeping tours de force in the Mediterranean; in six months he established himself, as Mr Dixon says, as a power in that great midland sea, from which his countrymen had been politically excluded since the age of the Crusades—teaching nations, to which England's very name was a strange sound, to respect its honours and its rights; chastising the pirates of Barbary with unprecedented severity; making Italy's petty princes feel the power of the northern Protestants; causing the pope himself to tremble on his seven hills; and startling the council-chambers of Venice and Constantinople with the distant echoes of our guns. And be it remembered, that England had then no Malta, Corfu, and Gibraltar as the bases of naval operations in the Mediterranean: on the contrary, Blake found that in almost every gulf and island of that sea—in Malta, Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, Algiers, Tunis, and Marseilles—there existed a rival and an enemy; nor were there more than three or four harbours in which he could obtain even bread for love or money.

After this memorable cruise, he had to conduct the Spanish war—a business quite to his mind; for though his highest renown had been gained in his conflicts with the Dutch, he had secretly disliked such encounters between two Protestant states; whereas, in the case of Popish Spain, his soul leaped at the anticipation of battle—sympathising as he did with the Puritan conviction, that Spain was the devil's stronghold in Europe. At this period, Blake was suffering from illness, and was sadly crippled in his naval equipments, having to complain constantly of the neglect at home to remedy the exigencies of the service. 'Our ships,' he writes, 'extremely foul, winter drawing on, our victuals expiring, all stores failing, our men falling sick through the badness of drink, and eating their victuals boiled in salt water for two months' space' (1655.) His own constitution was thoroughly undermined. For nearly a year, remarks his biographer, 'he had never quitted the "foul and defective" flag-ship. Want of exercise and sweet food, beer, wine, water, bread, and vegetables, had helped to develop scurvy and dropsy; and his sufferings from these diseases were now acute and continuous.' But his services were indispensable, and Blake was not the man to shrink from dying in harness. His sun set gloriously at Santa Cruz—that miraculous and unparalleled action, as Clarendon calls it, which excited such grateful enthusiasm at home. At home! words of fascination to the maimed and enfeebled veteran,4 who now turned his thoughts so anxiously towards the green hills of his native land. Cromwell's letter of thanks, the plaudits of parliament, and the jewelled ring sent to him by his loving countrymen, reached him while homeward bound. But he was not again to tread the shores he had defended so well.

As the ships rolled through the Bay of Biscay, his sickness increased, and affectionate adherents saw with dismay that he was drawing near to the gates of the grave. 'Some gleams of the old spirit broke forth as they approached the latitude of England. He inquired often and anxiously if the white cliffs were yet in sight. He longed to behold once more the swelling downs, the free cities, the goodly churches of his native land.... At last, the Lizard was announced. Shortly afterwards, the bold cliffs and bare hills of Cornwall loomed out grandly in the distance. But it was too late for the dying hero. He had sent for the captains and other great officers of his fleet, to bid them farewell; and while they were yet in his cabin, the undulating hills of Devonshire, glowing with the tints of early autumn, came full in view.... But the eyes which had so yearned to behold this scene once more were at that very instant closing in death. Foremost of the victorious squadron, the St George rode with its precious burden into the Sound; and just as it came into full view of the eager thousands crowding the beach, the pier-heads, the walls of the citadel, &c. ready to catch the first glimpse of the hero of Santa Cruz, and salute him with a true English welcome—he, in his silent cabin, in the midst of his lion-hearted comrades, now sobbing like little children, yielded up his soul to God.'

The corpse was embalmed, and conveyed to Greenwich, where it lay in state for some days. On the 4th of September 1657, the Thames bore a solemn funeral procession, which moved slowly, amid salvos of artillery, to Westminster, where a new vault had been prepared in the noble abbey. The tears of a nation made it hallowed ground. A prince, of whom the epigram declares that, if he never said a foolish thing, he never did a wise one—saw fit to disturb the hero's grave, drag out the embalmed body, and cast it into a pit in the abbey-yard. One of Charles Stuart's most witless performances! For Blake is not to be confounded—though the Merry Monarch thought otherwise—with the Iretons and Bradshaws who were similarly exhumed. The admiral was a moderate in the closest, a patriot in the widest sense.

In the chivalric disposition of the man, there was true affinity to the best qualities of the Cavalier, mingled sometimes with a certain grim humour, all his own. Many are the illustrations we might adduce of this high-minded and generous temperament. For instance: meeting a French frigate of forty guns in the Straits, and signaling for the captain to come on board his flag-ship, the latter, considering the visit one of friendship and ceremony, there being no declared war between the two nations—though the French conduct at Toulon had determined England on measures of retaliation—readily complied with Blake's summons; but was astounded, on entering the admiral's cabin, at being told he was a prisoner, and requested to give up his sword. No! was the surprised but resolute Frenchman's reply. Blake felt that an advantage had been gained by a misconception, and scorning to make a brave officer its victim, he told his guest he might go back to his ship, if he wished, and fight it out as long as he was able. The captain, we are told, thanked him for his handsome offer, and retired. After two hours' hard fighting, he struck his flag; like a true French knight, he made a low bow, kissed his sword affectionately, and delivered it to his conqueror. Again: when Blake captured the Dutch herring-fleet off Bochness, consisting of 600 boats, instead of destroying or appropriating them, he merely took a tithe of the whole freight, in merciful consideration towards the poor families whose entire capital and means of life it constituted. This 'characteristic act of clemency' was censured by many as Quixotic, and worse. But, as Mr Dixon happily says: 'Blake took no trouble to justify his noble instincts against such critics. His was indeed a happy fate: the only fault ever advanced by friend or foe against his public life, was an excess of generosity towards his vanquished enemies!' His sense of the comic is amusingly evidenced by the story of his ruse during a dearth in the same siege. Tradition reports, that only one animal, a hog, was left alive in the town, and that more than half starved. In the afternoon, Blake, feeling that in their depression a laugh would do the defenders as much good as a dinner, had the hog carried to all the posts and whipped, so that its screams, heard in many places, might make the enemy suppose that fresh supplies had somehow been obtained. According to his biographer, never man had finer sense of sarcasm, or used that weapon with greater effect—loving to find expression for its scorn and merriment in the satires of Horace and Juvenal; and thus in some degree relieving the stern fervour of Puritan piety with the more easy graces of ancient scholarship.

The moral aspects of his character appear in this memoir in an admirable light. If he did not stand so high as some others in public notoriety, it was mainly because, to stand higher than he did, he must plant his feet on a bad eminence. His patriotism was as pure as Cromwell's was selfish. Mr Dixon alludes to the strong points of contrast, as well as of resemblance, between the two men. Both, he says, were sincerely religious, undauntedly brave, fertile in expedients, irresistible in action. Born in the same year, they began and almost closed their lives at the same time. Both were country gentlemen of moderate fortune; both were of middle age when the revolution came. Without previous knowledge or professional training, both attained to the highest honours of the respective services. But there the parallel ends. Anxious only for the glory and interest of his country, Blake took little or no care of his personal aggrandisement. His contempt for money, his impatience with the mere vanities of power, were supreme. Bribery he abhorred in all its shapes. He was frank and open to a fault; his heart was ever in his hand, and his mind ever on his lips. His honesty, modesty, generosity, sincerity, and magnanimity, were unimpeached. Cromwell's inferior moral qualities made him distrust the great seaman; yet now and then, as in the case of the street tumult at Malaga, he was fain to express his admiration of Robert Blake. The latter was wholly unversed in the science of nepotism, and 'happy family' compacts; for although desirous of aiding his relatives, he was jealous of the least offence on their part, and never overlooked it. Several instances of this disposition are on record. When his brother Samuel, in rash zeal for the Commonwealth, ventured to exceed his duty, and was killed in a fray which ensued, Blake was terribly shocked, but only said: 'Sam had no business there.' Afterwards, however, he shut himself up in his room, and bewailed his loss in the words of Scripture: 'Died Abner as a fool dieth!' His brother Benjamin, again, to whom he was strongly attached, falling under suspicion of neglect of duty, was instantly broken, and sent on shore. 'This rigid measure of justice against his own flesh and blood, silenced every complaint, and the service gained immeasurably in spirit, discipline, and confidence.' Yet more touching was the great admiral's inexorable treatment of his favourite brother Humphrey, who, in a moment of extreme agitation, had failed in his duty. The captains went to Blake in a body, and argued that Humphrey's fault was a neglect rather than a breach of orders, and suggested his being sent away to England till it was forgotten. But Blake was outwardly unmoved, though inwardly his bowels did yearn over his brother, and sternly said: 'If none of you will accuse him, I must be his accuser.' Humphrey was dismissed from the service. It is affecting to know how painfully Blake missed his familiar presence during his sick and lonely passage homewards, when the hand of death was upon that noble heart. To Humphrey he bequeathed the greater part of his property.

In the rare intervals of private life which he enjoyed on shore, Blake also compels our sincere regard. When released for awhile from political and professional duties, he loved to run down to Bridgewater for a few days or weeks, and, as his biographer says, with his chosen books, and one or two devout and abstemious friends, to indulge in all the luxuries of seclusion. 'He was by nature self-absorbed and taciturn. His morning was usually occupied with a long walk, during which he appeared to his simple neighbours to be lost in profound thought, as if working out in his own mind the details of one of his great battles, or busy with some abstruse point of Puritan theology. If accompanied by one of his brothers, or by some other intimate friend, he was still for the most part silent. Always good-humoured, and enjoying sarcasm when of a grave, high class, he yet never talked from the loquacious instinct, or encouraged others so to employ their time and talents in his presence. Even his lively and rattling brother Humphrey, his almost constant companion when on shore, caught, from long habit, the great man's contemplative and self-communing gait and manner; and when his friends rallied him on the subject in after-years, he used to say, that he had caught the trick of silence while walking by the admiral's side in his long morning musings on Knoll Hill. A plain dinner satisfied his wants. Religious conversation, reading, and the details of business, generally filled up the evening until supper-time; after family prayers—always pronounced by the general himself—he would invariably call for his cup of sack and a dry crust of bread, and while he drank two or three horns of Canary, would smile and chat in his own dry manner with his friends and domestics, asking minute questions about their neighbours and acquaintance; or when scholars or clergymen shared his simple repast, affecting a droll anxiety—rich and pleasant in the conqueror of Tromp—to prove, by the aptness and abundance of his quotations, that, in becoming an admiral, he had not forfeited his claim to be considered a good classic.'

The care and interest with which he looked to the well-being of his humblest followers, made him eminently popular in the fleet. He was always ready to hear complaints and to rectify grievances. When wounded at the battle of Portland, and exhorted to go on shore for repose and proper medical treatment, he refused to seek for himself the relief which he had put in the way of his meanest comrade. Even at the early period of his cruise against the Cavalier corsairs of Kinsale, such was Blake's popularity, that numbers of men were continually joining him from the enemy's fleet, although he offered them less pay, and none of that licence which they had enjoyed under Prince Rupert's flag. They gloried in following a leader sans peur et sans reproche—one with whose renown the whole country speedily rang—the renown of a man who had revived the traditional glories of the English navy, and proved that its meteor flag could 'yet terrific burn.'

SUMMER LODGINGS

In the dominions of the Czar, the backs of the serfs suffer a weekly titillation as insufferable, although not so deadly, as the less frequent knout. When it comes to Wednesday, they begin to imagine that they are not exactly comfortable; on Thursday, the natural moisture of their skin seems fast drying up, and they are in an incipient fit of the fidgets; on Friday, the epidermis cracks all over, or makes-believe to do so; and on Saturday, the whole population, with a shout of impatient joy, rush to the bath-house of the village, like a herd of bullocks in the dog-days to the river, and boil themselves in steam. When thoroughly done, they come out, beautifully plumped, as the cooks say, and feeling fresh and vigorous, and as fit as ever they were in their lives to encounter a new week of serfdom.

An annual process analogous to this takes place in our own country. In spring, we begin to look wistfully at the garden, to watch the opening of the lettuces, and count the colours of the pansies. As the season advances, we wander into the fields, examine curiously the thin grass, and turn an admiring eye towards the green hills in the distance. As May breaks upon us in sunlight, though the east wind is still chill, we half persuade ourselves that this really is the season of love and sentiment; and when the month ripens into June, when the grass beneath our feet actually deserves the name of a carpet, when the trees are rich and umbrageous, when the birds are in full song, and the roses in full blow—then the hitherto indefinite longing of our heart acquires strength and purpose. The dry streets look unnatural; the formal lines of houses offend the taste; the air is close and hot; the younger children look pale, and their elder sisters languish. The month is at length out, and we wonder how we have survived it. The thing can no longer be borne: the town looks and breathes like a pest-house; while hill-sides glimmer in our waking dreams, broad seas stretch away till they are lost in the golden light—

'And dying winds and waters nearMake music to the lonely ear:'

still worse—everybody that is anybody is off to the country and the sea, and we rush madly after.

But the country? Where is the country? That is the puzzle. In our youth, we knew many a quiet village, many a fine beach, many a sheltered bay, where one might wander, or swim, or muse, or rusticate in any way he chose. The village has grown into a town; the beach is lined with villas; the bay swarms with vessels, and its shores with population. Every eligible spot on the coast becomes the resort of country-goers, till it is no longer the country. All local advantages are taken advantage of, till they disappear. The citizen, charmed with the countryness of the spot, builds his box by the water-side; the speculator runs up lines of houses; a handsome inn rises in the midst; and benevolent individuals hasten to the new centre of attraction, loaded with every kind of commodity men stand in need of, and are likely to buy. Here, in Scotland, on the Clyde, which is the grand sanatorium of the east as well as the west country, this process of change is remarkable. The once wildly beautiful shores, wherever there is not a town or a village, are dotted with trim white villas, glimmering here and there among the trees. The angles of the lochs, where these diverge from the parent stream, are covered with houses. The Gair Loch, which we remember as one of the sweetest mysteries of a mountain lake whose banks ever echoed to the songs of poetry and love, is a snug suburban retreat. The entrance of the Holy Loch, and of the dark and awful Loch Long, are fortified against the spirit of nature by groups of streets. At the heretofore quiet village of Dunoon, slumbering at the foot of its almost obliterated castle, you might lose yourself in the wilderness of new habitations. Gourock, on the opposite side, where in our boyhood the fairies disported round the Kempuck Stane, is a bustling town, with a suburb stretching along the Clyde, nearly as long as the long town of Kirkaldy, on the Forth; and at Largs, the barrows of the ancient Danes have become the cellars of the sons of little men, who confine spirits in them, as the prophet Solomon used to do, with a sealed cork. The once solitary island of Cumbrae is the town of Milport; the hoary ruins of Rothsay Castle are almost buried in a congeries of seaport streets and lanes; and, smoking, sputtering, and flapping their water-wings, scores of steamers ply in endless succession among these and a multitude of other places of renown.

All this, we may be told, is as it should be; a house is better than a hut, and the conveniences of civilised life better than roughing it in the desert: but we will not be comforted. Roughing it! that is just what the smoke-dried citizen wants occasionally, to prevent his blood from stagnating, and keep his faculties in working order. Physically, at least, we are not half the men we were when we used to rumble, and sometimes tumble, in stage-coaches, exposed to all the excitement and adventures of a journey; or to get as sick as forty dogs, tossing about whole days and nights in a sailing vessel. Then, when we landed, how delightful were the miseries of a cottage; the makeshifts, the squeezing, the dirt, the hunger—that veal-pie was always left behind!—the hunting of the neighbourhood for eggs for the children, the compulsory abstinence for three days out of four from butcher-meat, and the helpless dependence upon the chapter of accidents for everything else!

Now, we get into a railway carriage, or the cabin of a steamer, and after taking a book or a nap for an hour or two, raise our heads, and find ourselves, somehow or other, fifty miles off—in the country. The country is a genteel house in a genteel street, or a nice villa in a row of nice villas, where we are surrounded with all the conveniences we enjoy at home. The very society is the same; for our friends, Thomson and Smith, and the whole of that set, have brought their families to the same place for summer lodgings—it is so agreeable to be among one's acquaintances. Then we begin to enjoy ourselves: we have conversation-parties, and dancing-parties, and balls, all the same as at home. We enjoy our newspaper, as usual, in our comfortable reading-room. In the morning, we take a stroll or a dip, or drink water at the Wells, which, although undoubtedly nasty, is undeniably wholesome. Then there is a steamer in sight, and we all hasten to the pier, to ascertain if we know anybody on board. Then we dine early, for one must dine early in the country. Then we take a nap; then another stroll; then there is another steamer to watch; then we drink tea; then to the pier again. This time, the vessel's head is pointed homewards; and as she breaks away from the land, we follow her with our eyes till she is swallowed up in the distance. Then we turn away with a sigh; go back to our lodgings; lounge into bed; and fall asleep in the midst of the delightful sensation of having nothing to do, and being in the country.

All this is delightful, no doubt; every bit as good as being at home. Our aim, in fact, is to carry home with us—to feel as if we had never left No. 24. The closer the resemblance between our country lodgings and our town-house, the better we are off; for we then get what we have come for—change of air—without any sacrifice of comfort.

But we doubt whether 'change of air' has so limited a meaning. Hygienically speaking, it includes, we suspect, change of habits, change of diet, change of company, change of thought. The miseries of the old country lodgings were better for the health than the comforts of the new. The very grumbling they gave rise to was a wholesome exercise. The short allowance was worth a whole pharmacopœia. The ravenous appetite that fastened upon things common and unclean was a glorious symptom. We came back strengthened in mind as well as body. Our country sojourn had the effect of foreign travel in opening the heart and expanding the intellect; it smoothed away prejudices and upset conventionalities; and the ruddy glow of our sunburnt cheeks was the external token of the healthy natural tone of the feelings within. No; this passion for comfort and gentility in the wilderness, is a bad sign of the generation: it bespeaks effeminacy of character, and a vanity which, however graceful it may be thought in the town, shews mean and ridiculous among the hills, and woods, and waters of the country.

Among our neighbours on the continent, the summer move is not so universal as with us. In Paris, for instance, everything is considered the country that is outside the barriers; and in the fine season, every bourgeois family is outside the barriers at least once a week—eating, drinking, dancing, and singing. Then there are the walks in the Bois de Boulogne, and the picnics at St Cloud, and the excursions to Versailles: wherever there is green turf and shady trees, you hear the sounds of mirth and music rising in the clearest, brightest atmosphere in the world. Thus a sojourn out of town is not a necessity. They take change of air by instalments, and pass the summer in a state of chronic excitement.

In other parts of the world, the move is as entire as with us; and in at least one instance, all classes of the population desert the cities at the same time, and flock to the same sea-side. To be sure, this sea-side is somewhat extensive, and there need be no more crowding than is social and comfortable. An amusing account of the migration, and of the summer lodgings of Central America is given in Mr Squier's Nicaragua, recently published. The state of Nicaragua occupies that part of the Isthmus lying between the lake of the same name and the Pacific, the distance between being in some places only about fifteen miles. In this narrow tract there are several large towns, such as Grenada and Leon, which, in spite of the breath of the two oceans, get smoke-dried by the time the dry season advances into March. Then comes on the 'Paseo al mar,' or bathing-season, when a great portion of the population, taken not merely from the upper classes, but from the bourgeoisie and Indian peasantry, rush down to the shores of the Pacific. 'At that time,' says Mr Squier, 'a general movement of carts and servants takes place in the direction of the sea, and the government despatches an officer and a guard, to superintend the pitching of the annual camp upon the beach, or rather upon the forest-covered sand-ridge which fringes the shore. Each family builds a temporary cane-hut, lightly thatched with palm-leaves, and floored with petates or mats. The whole is wickered together with vines, or woven together basketwise, and partitioned in the same way, by means of coloured curtains of cotton cloth. This constitutes the penetralia, and is sacred to the bello sexo and the babies. The more luxurious ladies bring down their neatly-curtained beds, and make no mean show of elegance in the interior arrangements of their impromptu dwellings. Outside, and something after the fashion of their permanent residences, is a kind of broad and open shed, which bears a very distant relation to the corridor. Here hammocks are swung, the families dine, the ladies receive visitors, and the men sleep.... The establishments here described pertain only to the wealthier visitors, the representatives of the upper classes. There is every intermediate variety, down to those of the mozo and his wife, who spread their blankets at the foot of a tree, and weave a little bower of branches above them—an affair of ten or a dozen minutes. And there are yet others who disdain even this exertion, and nestle in the dry sand.'