y detect and seize upon incipient
ideas, for which the time is ripe, and upon the practical realization of
which the healthful development of the profession depends. With these
two, and with them not so much contemporaneously as in close historical
sequence, is associated the distinctive evolution of naval warfare in
the eighteenth century; in their combined names is summed up the
improvement of system to which Nelson and his contemporaries fell heirs,
and to which Nelson, under the peculiar and exceptional circumstances
which made his opportunity, gave an extension that immortalized him. Of
Hawke and Rodney, therefore, it may be said that they are in their
profession types of that element of change, in virtue of which the
profession grows; whereas the other four, eminent as they were,
exemplify rather the conservative forces, the permanent features, in the
strength of which it exists, and in the absence of any one of which it
droops or succumbs. It does not, however, follow that the one of these
great men is the simple continuator of the other's work; rather it is
true that each contributed, in due succession of orderly development,
the factor of progress which his day demanded, and his personality
embodied.

It was not in the forecast of the writer, but in the process of
treatment he came to recognize that, like Hawke and Rodney, the four
others also by natural characteristics range themselves in
pairs,--presenting points of contrast, in deficiencies and in
excellencies, which group them together, not by similarity chiefly, but
as complementary. Howe and Jervis were both admirable general officers;
but the strength of the one lay in his tactical acquirements, that of
the other in strategic insight and breadth of outlook. The one was
easy-going and indulgent as a superior; the other conspicuous for
severity, and for the searchingness with which he carried the exactions
of discipline into the minute details of daily naval life. Saumarez and
Pellew, less fortunate, did not reach high command until the great days
of naval warfare in their period had yielded to the comparatively
uneventful occupation of girdling the enemy's coast with a system of
blockades, aimed primarily at the restriction of his commerce, and
incidentally at the repression of his navy, which made no effort to take
the sea on a large scale. Under these circumstances the functions of an
admiral were mainly administrative; and if Saumarez and Pellew
posse