re of Captain Burton, a sedate old Cornish man of sixty
years of age, who had no more idea of love than he had of the Chaldee
language.

CHAPTER V.

Should a man full of talk be justified? O that ye would altogether
hold your peace; and it should be your wisdom.

JOB, CH. XI. 2; XIII. 5.

Voyages across the Atlantic are now performed every day by old and young
women and children, and described by them so much more elegantly and
scientifically, and with so much more correct knowledge of the
technicalities necessary for such descriptions, than it is possible that
seafaring men can ever attain, that if one of the latter, in a moment of
mental hallucination, was to undertake to convey an idea of the element
that has been his home for years, he would be hissed off the stage as
another Munchausen. For this reason nautical men, who have laid aside
the marlinspike and taken up the pen, very prudently avoid that portion
of the literary arena, leaving Daddy Neptune's dominions to be explored
and described by landsmen.

It is in obedience to public opinion in this respect, I suppose, that
our Secretaries of the Navy are almost uniformly chosen from the "mass
of the people," at the greatest possible distance from high-water mark;
men who have never seen a piece of water that they could not jump
across, or a ship, except in the newspaper, till they came to
Washington. "Let the sea make a noise, and the fulness thereof; let the
floods clap their hands" for joy, that the Cooks and the Falconers, the
Ansons and the Byrons, of olden time, are at length banished from the
department of nautical literature, and no _oceanic_ description will be
listened to unless said or sung by a _ci-devant_ midshipman or a
half-boy, half-woman poet, who lies in his berth, and sees, through the
four-inch-plank deadlight of a packet, the full moon rising in the west.
James Fenimore Cooper, Esq.--I give the man his entire name and title,
as he seems to insist upon it upon all occasions--the "American Walter
Scott," is undisputably at the very head of his _trade_ at the present
day for nautical descriptions; his terrestrial admirers have pronounced
him "a practical seaman;" and, of course, the only man in these United
States that can give any, even an approximate idea of the sea, and
"those that go down in ships." I have at my pen's end six or eight very
desperate "cases" of his knowledge of