thout these, no man can ever
be a sailor. But what opportunity is there in the navy for the display
of the wonderful abilities of the fool of the family's antipode, the
genius? Nothing will do for the surpassing brightness of some Highland
star but law or politics; so Donald has Latin and Greek shovelled into
him out of the dignified hat of some prebendary or bishop, goes to
Oxford, talks on all manner of subjects as if his tongue had
discovered the perpetual motion, goes to the bar, where the said
motion is the only one he is called upon to make, forces himself into
high society, wriggles his way into Parliament--the true Trophonius's
cave of aspiring orators--and becomes a silent Demosthenes, as he has
long been a lawless Coke; an ends at last in a paroxysm of wonder that
his creditors are hard-hearted and his country ungrateful, so that,
instead of being promoted to a seat at the Admiralty, he is removed to
one in the Fleet--which brings him very nearly to the same position he
would have been placed in, if a true estimate had been formed of his
powers at first. Oh fathers! if Tom is a donkey, keep him at home or
make him an attorney--it is amazing how a few years in "the office"
will brighten him--but don't trust the lives of men, and the honour of
the flag, to any but the best and wisest of your sons. Such a school
for moral training has never been devised as one of the floating
colleges that carry guns. The youngest midshipman acquires habits of
command, the oldest captain practises the ennobling virtue of
obedience; and these, we take it, form the alpha and omega of man's
useful existence. Power gives self-respect, responsibility gives
caution, and subjection gives humility. With all these united, as they
are in every rank in the service, the character has little room left
for improvement; tenderness and generosity, in addition, make a man a
Collingwood or Pellew--genius and heroism make him a Nelson.

But not through flowery paths do genius and heroism tread on their
path to fame. What a length of weary way, with what antres vast and
deserts idle, and pathless wildernesses bestrown, lay between the
Raisonable of 1770 and the Victory of 1805! and yet through them all,
the traveller's eye was unalterably fixed on the great light that his
soul saw filling the whole sky with its radiance, and which he knew
the whole time was reflected from the Baltic, and the Nile, and
Trafalgar. The letters of Nelson just given to t