nt of
his estate a carelessness he never showed in administering a fleet. It
is told that he once undertook to raise a sum by mortgage, in entire
forgetfulness of a much larger amount in bank. Far into old age he
retained the active habits of his prime. To say that he rose at four,
asserts a biographer, would be to understate the case; he was frequently
in the fields at half-past two in the early summer dawn of
England,--always before his laborers,--and he was not pleased if his
male guests did not appear by six. To ladies he was more tolerant. With
mind unclouded and unweakened to the last, he retained his interest in
public affairs and in the navy, contributing to the conversation which
animated his home the judgment of an acute intellect, though one deeply
tinged by prejudices inseparable from so strong a character. Thus
honored and solaced by the companionship of his friends, he awaited in
calm dignity the summons, which came on the 13th of March, 1823. He was
two months over eighty-eight when he passed away, the senior admiral of
Great Britain.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] This has been done by the author elsewhere (Influence of Sea Power
upon the French Revolution and Empire, Vol. I. pp. 371-377).

SAUMAREZ

1757-1836

"These were honourable among the thirty," says the ancient Hebrew
chronicler, "yet they attained not unto the first three." Since that
far-away day, when the three mighty men broke through the host of the
Philistines that they might bring their chieftain water from the well of
Bethlehem, to how many fighters, land and sea, have these words been
applicable!--men valiant in deed, wise in council, patient in endurance,
yet lacking that divine somewhat which, for want of a better name, we
call genius. Of such an one now, and, in contrasted sequence, of another
of his peers, we are about to give an account; men who in their
respective careers illustrated more conspicuously, the one the
distinctively military, the other the more purely nautical, aspects, in
the due blending of which the excellence of the profession is realized;
foremost, both, among the ocean warriors whose pennants flew through the
wild scenes where England's flag was called to brave the battle and the
breeze,

"Till danger's troubled night depart,
And the star of peace return."

James Saumarez was born on the 11th of March, 1757, in Guernsey, one of
the Channel group of islands that still remain attached to the English