already a full admiral, wearing his flag at
the mainmast head, was made Vice-Admiral of Great Britain; an honorary
position, but the highest in point of naval distinction that the nation
had to give. As one who held it three-quarters of a century later wrote,
"It has ever been regarded as the most distinguished compliment
belonging to our profession." The coincidence is significant that upon
Hawke's death Rodney succeeded him in it; affirming, as it were, the
consecutiveness of paramount influence exercised by the two on the
development of the Navy. In 1776 the peerage was at last conferred;
seventeen years after his great victory, and when, having passed three
score and ten, a man who had ever disdained to ask must have felt the
honor barren to himself, though acceptable for his son.

His last recorded professional utterances are in private letters
addressed in the summer of 1780 to the commander-in-chief of the
Channel Fleet--Francis Geary--who had served with him in the Bay of
Biscay, though he missed Quiberon. He recommends the maintenance of his
old station off Brest, and says, "For God's sake, if you should be so
lucky as to get sight of the enemy, get as close to them as possible. Do
not let them shuffle with you by engaging at a distance, but get within
musket shot if you can. This will be the means to make the action
decisive." In these words we find an unbroken chain of tradition between
Hawke and Nelson. One of Hawke's pupils was William Locker; and Locker
in turn, just before Hawke's death, had Nelson for a lieutenant. To him
Nelson in after years, in the height of his glory, wrote, "To you, my
dear friend, I owe much of my success. It was you who taught me,--'Lay a
Frenchman close and you will beat him.'"

Hawke died October 16, 1781. On his tomb appear these words, "Wherever
he sailed, victory attended him." It is much to say, but it is not all.
Victory does not always follow desert. "It is not in mortals to command
success,"--a favorite quotation with the successful admirals St. Vincent
and Nelson. Hawke's great and distinctive glory is this,--that he, more
than any one man, was the source and origin of the new life, the new
spirit, of his service. There were many brave men before him, as there
were after; but it fell to him in a time of great professional
prostration not only to lift up and hand on a fallen torch, but in
himself to embody an ideal and an inspiration from which others drew,
thus rekindli