to overthrow the British power there. A Spanish fleet of fourteen ships of the line, and Sooo troops, was to join De Grasse off Hayti. Thus an armada of fifty ships of the line, with 13,000 troops on board, would sweep down upon the British possessions from Barbados to Jamaica, in simply resistless strength. So confident of success were both French and Spaniards, that Don Galvez, who commanded the Spanish contingent, assumed the official title of "Governor of Jamaica" while yet lying in Havana. This was selling the bear's hide before the bear itself had been killed! Rodney, with Hood as his second in command, and a great fleet of thirty-six ships of the line, had to meet this threatening combination, and England at that moment possessed no sailor better fitted for the task. He was now sixty-four years of age, and his naval career had begun when he was a mere child. He was, therefore, as thorough a sailor as any salt in his forecastle, yet he was no mere "tarpaulin.”

A man of brilliant parts, of aristocratic tastes and connections, he had been a member of the House of Commons, Governor of Newfoundland, Master of Greenwich Hospital. He was familiar with great men and great affairs. Few men ever knew more alternations of fortune than Rodney. He had led British fleets to victory, and afterwards himself had to flee before the terrors of a bailiff's warrant to France, and so escape the pursuit of his creditors. A story, which has some evidence in its favour, tells how he was there offered the command of a French fleet if he would take arms against his own country. Rodney replied to the offer by affecting to think that the bearer of it was temporarily insane. The Duc de Chartres-infamous afterwards

as Philippe Egalité-asked Rodney what would happen if he met the British fleet off Brest. "In that case," said Rodney, "your Highness will have an opportunity of learning English." The generosity of a French nobleman, the Maréchal de Biron, enabled Rodney to settle with his English creditors, and in 1778 he returned to his native country to lead her fleet to the West Indies and destroy, only four years afterwards, the French naval power there. The sum lent by old De Biron to Rodney was 1000 louis, and that must be pronounced to be, for French interests, the very worst investment of French coin ever made.

A glance at Rodney's portrait while yet a young man, shows a curious resemblance to the younger Pitt. There are the same curved eyebrows and widely opened eyes, the same angle of forehead, the same challenging and haughty gaze. Rodney expended his life lavishly, drank deeply of what is called " pleasure," grew old quickly, was persecuted with gout, which gave impatient fire to his temper and scribbled his face with the characters of pain. Hence the sharpened gravity shown in his later portraits. Rodney was a man with many faults, but he had a great genius for battle. Green, the historian, describes him as "the greatest of English seamen save Nelson and Blake"; and it is certain that betwixt Blake's great defeat of Van Tromp in the Strait and Nelson's Titanic victory at Trafalgar, there is no sea battle which, for scale and far-reaching importance, can compare with Rodney's defeat of De Grasse.

Rodney, however, had not Blake's mingled simplicity and loftiness of character, and he lacked Nelson's electrical fire, and his faculty for knitting his officers to him

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self with a personal affection which made them, to use Nelson's own phrase, "a band of brothers." Rodney was too much of an aristocrat to try to win where he could command, and if he wrought his fleet into a perfect instrument of battle, flexible through all its parts to his every thought, he did this by mere force of imperious will. "I will be admiral," was his motto.

There were evil traditions at that moment in the naval service of Great Britain. Byng had been shot on his own quarter-deck for half-heartedness in battle. After Mathews's action off Toulon, in 1744, the admiral himself, his second in command, and eleven captains out of twenty-nine, were court-martialled. Mathews himself was cashiered because he had broken the line-an offence to the prim tactics of that day—and his captains because they did not follow him when he led down on to the enemy. Of the eleven captains, says Mahan, one died, one deserted, seven were dismissed, only two were acquitted. Rodney himself had been cheated of a great victory over Guichen, in 1780, by the deliberate disobedience of his own captains; and the story of how he created a new discipline in his fleet, and a new sense of duty and honour amongst his captains, is very stirring. He drilled his great fleet as a sharp-tempered sergeant drills a squad of recruits. 'Every captain in this fleet," he said to a friend, "thinks himself fit to be primeminister of Great Britain," and Rodney spared no pains to cure them of that delusion. The service, it must be added, was fissured by political divisions. A Whig captain was capable of remembering his politics even in the flaming stress of battle, and of refusing effective help to another British captain because he was guilty of being a

Tory. Rodney effaced all this. He put his fleet through drill manœuvres, scourging them into orders with angry signals and public rebukes until the captains of the old school, at least, were half-mad with wrath and perplexity. But he gave to his fleet that first condition of victory, an iron discipline.

The field upon which these two great fleets were now to manœuvre and contend for the next three days is a stretch of water, roughly 150 miles in extent from north to south, with a line of four islands-Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, and Santa Lucia-running through it, of which the three first named were French, and the last English. The actual battle took place in the channel betwixt Guadeloupe and Dominica, some twenty-three miles wide. In the centre, slightly westward, is a group of islets called the Saints, which gives its name to the battle.

Of the four days' manoeuvring which intervened betwixt the morning of April 8 and the great fight of the 12th, it is needless here to speak. Fleets in those sad days were governed by what may be called parade tactics, and their combats resembled the thrust and parry and flourish, the doubling, and the disengaging of a ceremonious duel, rather than the close and desperate fighting of Blake with his Dutchmen more than a century before, and of Nelson and his daring school twenty years afterwards. The ideal of an admiral in the early part of the eighteenth century was to keep his line intact, to manœuvre ingeniously for the advantage of the wind, to graze past his enemy's line from head to rear, each ship exchanging broadsides with each hostile ship as she passed. One fleet, more or less crippled,