tempt them; they were not adventurers
or colonizers; they had none of that accommodating temper as to creed,
customs, and diet, which is the necessary characteristic of the sailor.
But the nations they expelled from Canaan, the worshippers of the
fish-tailed Dagon, who fled westward to build Tartessus (Tarshish) on
the Gaditanian peninsula, or who clung with precarious footing to the
sea-shore of Philistia and the rocky steeps of Tyre and Sidon,--these
were seafarers. From them their Greek off-shoots, the Ionian islanders,
inherited something of the maritime faculty. There are traces in the
"Odyssey" of a nautical language, of a technology exclusively belonging
to the world "off soundings," and an exceeding delight in the rush and
spray-flinging of a vessel's motion,--

"The purple wave hissed from the bow of the
bark in its going."

Hence the Greek is somewhat of a sailor to this day, and in many a
Mediterranean port lie sharp and smartly-rigged brigantines with
classic names of old Heathendom gilt in pure Greek type upon their
sterns.

But the Greek and Carthaginian elements of the ocean language must now
lie buried very deep in it, and it is hard to recognize their original
image and superscription in those smooth-worn current coins which form
the basis of the sea-speech. It is not within the limits of a cursory
paper like this to enter into too deep an investigation, or to trace
perhaps a fanciful lineage for such principal words as "mast," and
"sail," and "rope." In one word, "anchor," the Greek plainly
survives,--and doubtless many others might be made out by a skilful
philologist.

The Roman, to whom the empire of the sea, or, more properly speaking,
the petty principality of the Mediterranean, was transferred, had
little liking for that sceptre. He was driven to the water by sheer
necessity, but he never took to it kindly. He was at best a
sea-soldier, a marine, not brought up from the start in the
merchant-service and then polished into the complete blue-jacket and
able seaman of the navy. Nobody can think of those ponderous old
Romans, whose comedies were all borrowed from Attica, whose poems were
feeble echoes of the Greek, and whose architecture, art, and domestic
culture were at best the work of foreign artists,--nobody can think of
them at sea without a quiet chuckle at the inevitable consequences of
the first "reef-topsail breeze." Fancy those solemn, stately
Patricians, whose very puns are pon