on the Brunswick. Her mizzen and main masts were gone, but the foremast still stood. The Brunswick's larboard broadside was opened on the Achille when that ship was within musket-shot distance, with such effect, that her sole remaining mast, with its pile of canvas, came tumbling down. She swung round parallel with the Brunswick, and after exchanging half-a-dozen broadsides with that ship, struck her colours! Thus the Brunswick, while fighting the Vengeur to leeward, compelled the Achille, to windward, to strike. The Brunswick, however, still engaged in deadly wrestle with the Vengeur, could not launch a boat to take possession of the Achille, and that ship, at last, hoisting up a spritsail, crept out of fire with re-hoisted

colours.

At 12.45 P.M. a heavy roll of the two ships tore the Brunswick's anchors loose from the Vengeur, and the dismasted and shattered hulls, still sullenly firing at each other, swung apart. The Ramilies, an English seventy-four, commanded, as it happened, by the brother of the Brunswick's captain, at this moment swept through the zone of smoke which encircled the two ships, in pursuit of the Achille, and fired one deadly broadside as it passed into the stern of the Vengeur. At one o'clock the Vengeur struck, a Union Jack being hung out over her quarter as a sign of surrender; but the Brunswick was in no condition to take possession of her beaten foe. The much-battered Vengeur sank lower and still lower in the sea; at each roll the water swept in through her ports. Late in the afternoon the boats of the Alfred, the Culloden, and of a British cutter, the Rattler, took off the captain and

crew of the Vengeur, and the great ship, with splintered bulwarks, dismounted guns, and decks splashed red with slaughter, sank. Four hundred of her crew had been taken off by the boats of the British, but some remained. They had broken, it was said, into the spiritroom, and were drunk, and, just as the great ship made her final plunge, a few of them were visible on deck, shouting, in drunken defiance, "Vive la République !"

By noon the firing had died down. Eleven of the British ships were more or less nearly dismasted, twelve of the French were in yet more evil case, and were drifting helplessly to leeward. Villaret-Joyeuse gathered by signal his uninjured, or slightly injured ships around him, and bore down to cover the shattered, drifting hulks which formed the rest of his fleet. It was a gallant stroke, both of tactics and of seamanship, and actually saved at least five French ships from becoming prizes. Howe met the attempt by a counterstroke, and Villaret-Joyeuse drew off, leaving seven great line-of-battle ships to become British prizes. Of these one, the Vengeur, sank; the other six were carried in triumph into Portsmouth.

The battle of the First of June, in one sense, failed of its strategic object. The great American convoy was not intercepted; afterwards, indeed, it crossed the waters where the great fight had raged, and found them strewn with the wrecks of the fight, and reached Brest in safety. Howe, too, has been blamed for not making the most of his victory. He had at least one-third of his fleet in perfect fighting condition, yet he allowed VillaretJoyeuse to carry off five dismantled ships in safety. The truth is, Howe himself, a man nearly seventy years

of age, was physically prostrate with the long strain of the fight and of the manœuvres of the preceding days; and he had reason to complain of some of his captains. But the First of June was a great and memorable victory. The total loss of the British in killed and wounded was less than 1200, that of the French was not less than 7000. The moral effect of the victory, too, was immense. It was the first great naval engagement of the revolutionary war, and it gave to British fleets a confidence and prestige which powerfully influenced the whole history of that war.

The battle abounded in picturesque and even amusing incidents. Pakenham, for example, who commanded the Invincible, was a daring but somewhat reckless Irishman. He drifted through the smoke on a French ship, and opened fire upon her with great energy. After a time, the fire of the Frenchman died away, while that of the Invincible grew yet more furious. Pakenham, however, was dissatisfied with the circumstance that the Frenchman made no reply, and he hailed her to know if she surrendered. The Frenchman replied, energetically, "No!" whereupon the gallant Irishman inquired in tones of disgust, “Then, you, why don't

you fire!" Gambier, another of Howe's captains, was the exact opposite of the hare-brained Pakenham; a fine sailor, a brave fighter, and of sober and puritanic temper. His ship, the Defence, of seventy-four guns, fought gallantly, and had two of her masts shot away; when, through the smoke, the tall masts of a French three-decker were visible bearing down upon her. A lieutenant hurried to the quarter-deck and cried to Gambier,

my eyes, sir, but here's a whole moun

tain coming down upon us! What shall we do?" To which the unmoved Gambier answered by asking how his officer dared at such a moment as that to come to him with an oath in his mouth. "Go down to your guns, sir," he added, " and encourage your men to stick to their guns like British tars!"

Perhaps the most humorous story in connection with the First of June is the amazing fable of the Vengeur, which is due to the patriotic imagination, unrestrained by any regard for prosaic accuracy, of Barrère. Barrère reported to the Convention that the Vengeur went down with all her colours flying, scorning to surrender; "Vive la République, and a universal volley from the upper deck being the last sound she made.” "Glorieuse affaire du Vengeur" became, for the French, a national myth. It has inspired innumerable French songs. A wooden model of the Vengeur was solemnly consecrated, and placed in the Pantheon. Carlyle embodied the story in his "French Revolution." "Lo!" he wrote, "all flags, streamers, jacks, every rag of tricolour that will yet run on rope flies rustling aloft. The whole crew crowds to the upper deck; and with universal soul-maddening yell, shouts, 'Vive la République,' sinking, sinking." Carlyle later on discovered how wild a flight of fiction the whole story was. Barrère was a liar

of Titanic scale; but the Vengeur myth, Carlyle declared, must be pronounced "Barrère's masterpiece; the largest, most inspiring piece of blague manufactured for some centuries by any man or nation." At the time the Vengeur went down, the battle had ceased for some hours; her captain was peacefully getting his lunch in one of the cabins of the Culloden, and some 400 of her crew

had been rescued, much to their own satisfaction, by the boats of the various British ships!

Howe, the victor of the First of June, does not stand in the first rank of British admirals. He had no touch of Nelson's electric genius for war, or of Jervis's iron will. It may be doubted whether he could have followed an enemy's fleet through tempest and darkness and unknown reefs, with the cool and masterful daring with which Hawke followed Conflans into the tangle of reefs off Quiberon. But Howe belongs to the type of men who are the strength of the State. Unselfish, loyal, single-minded, putting duty before glory and the State before self. He was known as "Black Dick" amongst his crews, from his dark complexion and hair, and he was loved as few British leaders, by either sea or land, have ever been loved. And the secret of the affection he awakened lay not so much in his patience and gentleness of temper, or his keen regard for the health and comfort of his men-it was found in the crystalline simplicity and sincerity of his character; his calm indifference to either gain or fame; and his self-forgetting patriotism.