urance of capacity for great things.
The same evidence is to be found in his letters, which, as studies of
official character and competency, repay a close perusal. But now
fifteen years of peace were to elapse before a maritime war again broke
out, and the fifteen years between forty-five and sixty tell sorely upon
the physical stamina which need to underlie the mental and moral forces
of a great commander. St. Vincent himself staggered under the load, and
Rodney was not a St. Vincent in the stern self-discipline that had
braced the latter for old age. He had not borne the yoke in his youth,
and from this time forward he fought a losing fight with money troubles,
which his self-controlled contemporary, after one bitter experience, had
shaken off his shoulders forever.

The externals of Rodney's career during the period now in question are
sufficiently known; of his strictly private life we are left largely to
infer from indications, not wholly happy. He returned to England a
Vice-Admiral of the Blue, and had advanced by the successive grades of
that rank to Vice-Admiral of the Red, when, in January, 1771, he was
appointed Commander-in-chief at Jamaica. At this time he had been for
five years Governor of Greenwich Hospital, and he took it hard that he
was not allowed to retain the appointment in connection with his new
command, alleging precedents for such a favor; the latest of which,
however, was then twenty-five years old. The application was denied by
Sandwich. From the earnest tone in which it was couched, as well as the
comparatively weak grounds upon which Rodney bases his claims to such a
recognition, it can scarcely be doubted that pecuniary embarrassment as
well as mortification entered into his sense of disappointment. It is
the first recorded of a series of jars between the two, in which,
although the external forms of courtesy were diligently observed, an
underlying estrangement is evident.

The Jamaica Station at that day required, in an even greater degree than
Newfoundland before the conquest of Canada, a high order of political
tact and circumspection on the part of the naval commander-in-chief. The
island lies in the centre of what was then a vast semi-circular sweep of
Spanish colonies--Porto Rico, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, Central
America, and the mainland of South America from the Isthmus to the
Orinoco. Over this subject empire the mother country maintained
commercial regulations of the most me