fficer-like propriety, by stringent prescription of forms of respect
and rigid exaction of their observance. To stand uncovered before a
superior, instead of lightly touching the hat, to pay outward reverence
to the national flag, to salute the quarter-deck as the seat of
authority, were no vain show under him. "Discipline," he was fond of
quoting, "is summed up in the one word, 'Obedience;'" and these customs
were charged with the observance which is obedience in spirit. They
conduced to discipline as conventional good manners, by rendering the
due of each to each, knit together the social fabric and maintain the
regularity and efficiency of common life; removing friction, suppressing
jars, and ministering constantly to the smooth and even working of the
social machinery.

By measures such as these, extending to all ranks and every detail,
exemplifying, in spirit and in form, the extremes of cordial reward,
iron restraint, and weighty punishment, Jervis patiently fashioned the
fleet which was to be both a pattern for coming days, and the highly
tempered instrument to achieve his own victory of Cape St. Vincent and
the earlier triumphs of Nelson; as well as to sustain and to crush the
onset of mutiny which soon afterwards shook the Navy to its centre. For
purely military action of an aggressive character no opportunity was
afforded him. His coming to the Mediterranean coincided with that of
Napoleon Bonaparte to the Army of Italy. During 1795, wrote Nelson, if
the British fleet had done its duty, the French army could not have
moved along the Riviera of Genoa. It failed, and the Austrian general,
its ally, also failed to act with vigor. So the year had ended, for the
Austrians, with a disastrous defeat and a retreat behind the Apennines.
To the Riviera they never returned to receive the co-operation which
Jervis stood eager to give. At their first move to cross the mountains,
Bonaparte struck, and followed up his blows with such lightning-like
rapidity that in thirty days they were driven back over a hundred miles,
behind the Adige; their chief fortress, Mantua, was blockaded; all
northwest Italy with its seaboard, including Leghorn, was in the power
of France; and Naples also had submitted. Jervis, powerless to strike a
blow when no enemy was within reach, found his fleet without a friendly
port nearer than Gibraltar, while Corsica, where alone he could expect
anchorage and water, was seething with revolt against the Br