e Chinese
war--their simultaneous operation with troops. In former assaults of
fortresses, the troops and ships attacked the same line of defence,
and the consequence was the waste of force. From the moment when the
troops approached the land, the fire of the ships necessarily ceased,
and the fleet then remained spectators of the assault. But in this
war, while the troops attacked on the land side, the fleet ran up to
the sea batteries, and both attacks went on together--of course
dividing the attention of the enemy, thus having a double chance of
success, and employing both arms of the service in full energy. This
masterly combination the Duke of Wellington, the highest military
authority in Europe, pronounced to be a new principle in war; and even
this is, perhaps, only the beginning of a system of combination which
will lead to new victories, if war should ever unhappily return.

We now revert to the history of a naval hero.

John Jervis, the second son of Swynfen Jervis, Esq., was born on the
20th of January 1735. He was descended, on both the paternal and
maternal side, from families which had figured in the olden times of
England. The family of Jervis possessed estates in Staffordshire as
far back as the reign of Edward III. The family of Swynfen was also
long established in Worcestershire. John Swynfen was a public
character during the troubled times of Charles I. and Cromwell, and
until a late period in the reign of Charles II. He had been originally
a strong Parliamentarian; but, thinking that the party went too far,
he was turned out of parliament for tardiness by the Protector. But
his original politics adhered to him still; for, even after the
restoration, he was joined with Hampden, the grandson of the
celebrated patriot, in drawing up the Bill of Exclusion. Among his
ancestors by the mother's side was Sir John Turton, a judge in the
Court of King's Bench, married to a daughter of the brave Colonel
Samuel Moore, who made the memorable defence of Hopton Castle in the
Civil War.

But no man less regarded ancestry than the subject of the present
pages, who, in writing with reference to his pedigree, observed, in
his usual frank and straightforward language--"They were all highly
respectable; but, _et genus et proavos_, nearly all the Latin I now
recollect, always struck my ear as the sound maxim for officers and
statesmen."

His first school was at Burton-upon-Trent, where a slight incident
seemed to des