pprove. Sir Walter's is a mild
gentleman, concerning whom one wonders how he ever came to be in such
company. Michael Scott's pirate is a bloodthirsty ruffian enough, and
yet it is difficult to feel that a person who dressed in such a highly
picturesque manner, and who was commonly either a Don or a Scotch
gentleman of ancient descent, was quite the real thing. Mr. Stevenson's
pirate is nearer what one knows must have been the life. He is a
cowardly, lurking, petty scoundrel. John Silver is certainly something
very different, but then when Mr. Stevenson drew the commanding figure
in Treasure Island he was not making a portrait of a pirate, but was
only making play with the well-established puppet of boys' books. Yet,
after all, the pirate, if he was not such an agreeable rascal as John
Silver, was not always the greedy, spiritless rogue drawn in the _Master
of Ballantrae_. To do him properly and as he was, he ought to be
approached with a mixture of humour and morality, and also with a
knowledge of the facts concerning him, which to the best of my knowledge
have never been combined in any writer.

Captain Johnson, in his valuable _General History of the Pirates from
their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence to the
present time_, begins with antiquity. He mounts up the dark backward
abyss of time till he meets with the pirates who captured Julius Caesar,
and were suppressed by Pompey. This is not necessary. Our pirate was a
very different fellow from those broken men of the ancient world, the
wrecks of States shattered by Rome and the victims of the usury of the
Knights who collected in the creeks of Cilicia. It is not quite easy to
say what he was, but we know well enough what he was not. He was not for
many generations the recognised enemy of the human race. On the
contrary, he was often a comparative respectable person, who was
disposed to render service to his king and country at a crisis, even if
he did not see his advantage in virtuous conduct. To begin with, he was
only a seafaring man who carried on the universal practice of the Middle
Ages after they had ceased to be recognised as legitimate. Then for a
long time a pirate was not thought worthy of hanging until he had shown
a hopelessly contumacious disposition by refusing the king's pardon
several times. Sir William Monson, who was admiral to James I., saw no
harm in recruiting well-known pirates for His Majesty's service. On the
coast of Irel