read stockings,
high shoes and buckles, and a plain cocked hat, a prodigiously long
silver-handled sword completing my costume. Dick Martingall's and Tom
Painter's dresses were not much less out of order, giving them more the
appearance of gentlemen of the highway than of naval officers of
respectability. One had a large brass sword, once belonging to his
great-grandfather, a trooper in the army of the Prince of Orange, the
other a green-handled hanger, which had done service with Sir Cloudsley
Shovel." The writer and his friends had to beat a precipitate retreat
from the _Torbay_, as, with a stamp of his foot, their future captain
ordered them to begone, and instantly get cut-down and reduced into
ordinary proportions by the Plymouth tailors. This description refers
to some thirty years later than the time we are speaking of. The tailor
had taken his models, the writer observes, from the days of Benbow; or
rather, perhaps, from the costumes of those groups who go about at
Christmas time enacting plays in the halls of the gentry and nobility,
and are called by the west-country folks "geese-dancers."

Vice-Admiral Anson, who had returned from his voyage to the Pacific, was
now placed in command of a powerful fleet, and sent to cruise on the
coast of France. He and Rear-Admiral Warren sailed from Plymouth on the
9th of April to intercept the French fleet, with which it fell in on the
3rd of May off Cape Finisterre, convoying a large number of merchantmen.
Admiral Anson had made the signal to form line of battle, when
Rear-Admiral Warren, suspecting the enemy to be merely manoeuvring to
favour the escape of the convoy, bore down and communicated his opinion
to the admiral, who thereon threw out a signal for a general chase. The
_Centurion_, under a press of sail, was the first to come up with the
rearmost French ship, which she attacked in so gallant a manner that two
others dropped astern to her support. Three more English ships coming
up, the action became general. The French, though much inferior in
numbers, fought with great spirit till seven in the evening, when all
their ships were taken, as well as nine sail of East India ships. The
enemy lost 700 men, killed and wounded, and the British 250. Among the
latter was Captain Grenville of the _Defiance_, to whom a monument was
erected by his uncle, Lord Cobham, in his gardens at Stowe. Upwards of
300,000 pounds were found on board the ships of war, which were