n out the force of the garrison. The assault had continued
for several hours without success on either side, when a private man of
the artillery, his eye on the floating batteries, suddenly called with
ecstasy, "She burns, by G----!";[486] and first that vessel and then
others were visibly discovered to be on fire, and the besiegers' game
was decidedly up.
We stood into the Bay of Gibraltar and approached the harbour firing a
gun and hoisting a signal for a boat: one accordingly came off--a
man-of-war's boat--but refused to have any communication with us on
account of the quarantine, so we can send no letters ashore, and after
some pourparlers, Mr. L----, instead of joining his regiment, must
remain on board. We learned an unpleasant piece of news. There has been
a tumult at Bristol and some rioters shot, it is said fifty or sixty. I
would flatter myself that this is rather good news, since it seems to be
no part of a formed insurrection, but an accidental scuffle in which the
mob have had the worst, and which, like Tranent, Manchester, and
Bonnymoor, have always had the effect of quieting the people and
alarming men of property.[487] The Whigs will find it impossible to
permit men to be plundered by a few blackguards called by them the
people, and education and property probably will recover an ascendency
which they have only lost by faintheartedness.
We backed out of the Bay by means of a current to the eastward, which
always runs thence, admiring in our retreat the lighting up the windows
in the town and the various barracks or country seats visible on the
rock. Far as we are from home, the general lighting up of the windows in
the evening reminds us we are still in merry old England, where in
reverse of its ancient law of the curfew, almost every individual,
however humble his station, takes as of right a part of the evening for
enlarging the scope of his industry or of his little pleasures. He trims
his lamp to finish at leisure some part of his task, which seems in such
circumstances almost voluntary, while his wife prepares the little meal
which is to be its legitimate reward. But this happy privilege of
English freemen has ceased. One happiness it is, they will soon learn
their error.
_November_ 15.--I had so much to say about Gibraltar that I omitted all
mention of the Strait, and more distant shores of Spain and Barbary,
which form the extreme of our present horizon; they are highly
interesting. A chain
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