th a rod, dealt out criticism unsparingly, and
avowed it as his purpose and principle of action so to rule. It is not
meant that his censures were undeserved, or even excessive; but there
entered into them no ingredient of pity. His despatches are full of
complaints, both general and specific. When he spared, it was from a
sense of expediency,--or of justice, a trait in which he was by no
means deficient; but for human weakness he had no bowels. Hawke
complains of but this one captain, Fox, and towards him he seems not to
have evinced the strong feeling that animated his juniors. Each man has
his special gift, and to succeed must needs act in accordance with it.

There are those who lead and those who drive; Hawke belonged to the one
class, Rodney to the other.

In direct consequence of this difference of temperament, it will be
found, in contrasting the schools of which Hawke and Rodney are the
conspicuous illustrations, that the first represents the spirit, and the
second the form, which were the two efficient elements of the progress
made during the eighteenth century. The one introduces into a service
arrested in development, petrified almost, by blindly accepted rules and
unintelligent traditions, a new impulse, which transforms men from
within, breaking through the letter of the law in order to realize its
forgotten intent; the other gives to the spirit, thus freed from old
limitations, a fresh and sagacious direction, but needs nevertheless to
impose its own methods by constraint from without. It is the old
struggle, ever renewed, between liberty and law; in the due, but
difficult, combination of which consist both conservation and progress.

And so in the personality of the two great admirals who respectively
represent these contrasting schools of practice; while we find in both
these two elements, as they must exist in every efficient officer, yet
it is to be said that the one inspires and leads, the other moulds and
compels. The one, though seemingly reserved, is in character
sympathetic, and influences by example chiefly; the other, austerely
courteous, is towards associates distant and ungenial, working by fear
rather than by love. For these broad reasons of distinction it is
Mathews's battle that best measures the reaction of which Hawke is the
type, for there was especially illustrated defect of spirit, to cover
which the letter of the law was invoked; whereas in Byng's action,
extremely bad form, in the