ast they
have left.

However we may deplore those old wars as unnecessary; however much
we may hate war in itself, as perhaps the worst of all the
superfluous curses with which man continues to deface himself and
this fair earth of God, yet one must be less than Englishman, less,
it may be, than man, if one does not feel a thrill of pride at
entering waters where one says to oneself,--Here Rodney, on the
glorious 12th of April 1782, broke Count de Grasse's line (teaching
thereby Nelson to do the same in like case), took and destroyed
seven French ships of the line and scattered the rest, preventing
the French fleet from joining the Spaniards at Hispaniola; thus
saving Jamaica and the whole West Indies, and brought about by that
single tremendous blow the honourable peace of 1783. On what a
scene of crippled and sinking, shattered and triumphant ships, in
what a sea, must the conquerors have looked round from the
Formidable's poop, with De Grasse at luncheon with Rodney in the
cabin below, and not, as he had boastfully promised, on board his
own Fills de Paris. Truly, though cynically, wrote Sir Gilbert
Blane, 'If superior beings make a sport of the quarrels of mortals,
they could not have chosen a better theatre for this magnificent
exhibition, nor could they ever have better entertainment than this
day afforded.'

Yon lovely roadstead of Dominica--there it was that Rodney first
caught up the French on the 9th of April, three days before, and
would have beaten them there and then, had not a great part of his
fleet lain becalmed under these very highlands, past which we are
steaming through water smooth as glass. You glance, again, running
down the coast of Martinique, into a deep bay, ringed round with gay
houses embowered in mango and coconut, with the Piton du Vauclain
rising into the clouds behind it. That is the Cul-de-sac Royal, for
years the rendezvous and stronghold of the French fleets. From it
Count de Grasse sailed out on the fatal 8th of April; and there,
beyond it, opens an isolated rock, of the shape, but double the
size, of one of the great Pyramids, which was once the British sloop
of war Diamond Rock.

For, in the end of 1803, Sir Samuel Hood saw that French ships
passing to Fort Royal harbour in Martinique escaped him by running
through the deep channel between Pointe du Diamante and this same
rock, which rises sheer out of the water 600 feet, and is about a