vere illness in the winter; and when recovered I
unguardedly let myself in for another month's work, on naval tactics,
which might have been postponed. Hence the end of the following May
had arrived before I began to write; but I was so full of matter,
absorbed or evolved, that I ran along with steady pace, and by
September had on paper, in lecture form, all of my first _Sea Power_
book, except the summary of conclusions which constitutes the final
chapter. Before publication, in 1890, the whole had been very
carefully revised; but the changes made were mostly in the details of
battles, or else verbal in character, to develop discussions in
amplitude or clearness. Battles had been to me at first a secondary
consideration; hence for revision I had accumulated many fresh data,
notably from two somewhat scarce books: _Naval Battles in the West
Indies_, by Lieutenant Matthews, and _Naval Researches_, by Captain
Thomas White, British officers contemporary and participant in the
events which they narrate of the War of American Independence.

A lecturer is little hampered by the exactions of style; indeed, the
less he ties himself to his manuscript, the more he can talk to his
audience rather than read, and the more freely his command of his
subject permits him to digress pertinently, the better he holds
attention. When I found after my first course that the treatment was
to my hearers interesting as well as novel, the thought of publishing
entered my mind; and while I had no expectation or ambition to become
a stylist, the question of style gradually forced itself on my
consideration. I intend to state some of my conclusions, because the
casual remarks of others, authors or critics, have been helpful to me.
Why should not style as well as war have its history and biography, to
which each man may contribute an unpretentious mite? Notably, I got
much comfort from Darwin's complaint of frequent recurrences of
inability to give adequate expression to thoughts, which he could then
put down only in such crude, imperfect form as the moment suggested,
leaving the task of elaboration to a more propitious season. If so
great a man was thus troubled, no strange thing was happening to me in
a like experience. Such good cheer in intellectual as well as moral
effort is one of the best services of biography and history, raising
to the rank of ministering spirits the men whose struggles and success
they tell. Was not Washington greater at Va