t--but made unconquerable by the presence of Nelson--stayed the
advance of a whole squadron of Spanish three-deckers, and took two
ships, each bigger than itself, by boarding. Was there ever a finer
deed wrought under "the meteor flag"! Nelson disobeyed orders by
leaving the English line and flinging himself on the van of the
Spaniards, but he saved the battle. Calder, Jervis's captain,
complained to the admiral that Nelson had "disobeyed orders." "He
certainly did," answered Jervis; "and if ever you commit such a breach
of your orders I will forgive you also."

THE HEIGHTS OF ABRAHAM

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
--SIR WALTER SCOTT.

The year 1759 is a golden one in British history. A great French army
that threatened Hanover was overthrown at Minden, chiefly by the heroic
stupidity of six British regiments, who, mistaking their orders, charged
the entire French cavalry in line, and destroyed them. "I have seen,"
said the astonished French general, "what I never thought to be
possible--a single line of infantry break through three lines of cavalry
ranked in order of battle, and tumble them into ruin!" Contades omitted
to add that this astonishing infantry, charging cavalry in open
formation, was scourged during their entire advance by powerful batteries
on their flank. At Quiberon, in the same year, Hawke, amid a tempest,
destroyed a mighty fleet that threatened England with invasion; and on
the heights of Abraham, Wolfe broke the French power in America. "We are
forced," said Horace Walpole, the wit of his day, "to ask every morning
what new victory there is, for fear of missing one." Yet, of all the
great deeds of that _annus mirabilis_, the victory which overthrew
Montcalm and gave Quebec to England--a victory achieved by the genius of
Pitt and the daring of Wolfe--was, if not the most shining in quality,
the most far-reaching in its results. "With the triumph of Wolfe on the
heights of Abraham," says Green, "began the history of the United States."

The hero of that historic fight wore a singularly unheroic aspect.
Wolfe's face, in the famous picture by West, resembles that of a nervous
and sentimental boy--he was an adjutant at sixteen, and only thirty-three
when he fell, mortally wounded, under the walls of Quebec. His forehead
and chin receded; his no