roduces his three vessels, and sketches their
respective starting-places--Plymouth, Portsmouth, and St. Malo. Here
again it is to be noted that Marryat is far more at home in the
man-of-war than in the smuggler or the yacht. Mr. Appleboy, with his
forty-five years' service, and the interesting story which remains
untold of the something which took place in '93 or '94, his seventeen
daily tumblers of gin-toddy, his mate and his midshipman, is a part, and
not an inferior one, of Marryat's inimitable naval gallery. The
_Happy-go-lucky_ is perhaps rather a smuggler of the Pays Bleu than of
the British Channel, but she is sufficiently in place in a story not
intended to be too slavishly faithful to life. Morrison, the
sailing-master, with his augury of the blue pigeon, is real, and nothing
can be more consistent with human nature than that he should have cursed
the bird when he did finally find himself in prison. As for the
adventures, they belong to the region of the fantastic, which does not
pretend to be anything else. The idea of a yacht which endeavours the
capture of a smuggler, and is herself made prize by him, is of course a
motive for farce.

The scenes on board the captive yacht are not exactly horse-play. There
are too many ladies concerned, and Marryat, in spite of occasional
lapses of taste, preferred to write like a gentleman. But if there is no
horse-play there is a great deal of what I hope it is permissible to
describe as 'lark.' The sour old maid Miss Ossulton, her niece Cecilia,
who, if she has not much character, is still a very nice girl, the
frisky widow Mrs. Lascelles, make a capital trio. Given a gallant
dashing smuggler, who is really a gentleman in disguise, in possession
of the yacht, and determined to revenge himself on the owner by taking a
little harmless amusement, it follows that lively incidents are to be
expected. Marryat did not work the situation out at any length, probably
because he felt that the stuff would not bear much handling. If he cut
his story short for this reason he was undoubtedly right. It is so
difficult as to be quite impossible for the majority of writers to hang
just on the border of the outrageously impossible for more than a few
pages. While it lasts it is very good fun. The reformation of
Pickersgill through the influence of Mrs. Lascelles is quite in
Marryat's manner. His heroes, when they need reformation, are commonly
brought into the right path by the combined infl