Jack was a gentleman. What though his hand was hard, so was not
his heart, too often the case with soft palms. His manners were
easy and free; none of the boisterousness, so common to tars; and
he had a polite, courteous way of saluting you, if it were only
to borrow your knife. Jack had read all the verses of Byron, and
all the romances of Scott. He talked of Rob Roy, Don Juan, and
Pelham; Macbeth and Ulysses; but, above all things, was an ardent
admirer of Camoens. Parts of the Lusiad, he could recite in the
original. Where he had obtained his wonderful accomplishments, it
is not for me, his humble subordinate, to say. Enough, that those
accomplishments were so various; the languages he could converse
in, so numerous; that he more than furnished an example of that
saying of Charles the Fifth--_ he who speaks five languages is as
good as five men_. But Jack, he was better than a hundred common
mortals; Jack was a whole phalanx, an entire army; Jack was a
thousand strong; Jack would have done honour to the Queen of
England's drawing-room; Jack must have been a by-blow of some
British Admiral of the Blue. A finer specimen of the island race
of Englishmen could not have been picked out of Westminster Abbey
of a coronation day.

His whole demeanor was in strong contrast to that of one of the
Captains of the fore-top. This man, though a good seaman,
furnished an example of those insufferable Britons, who, while
preferring other countries to their own as places of residence;
still, overflow with all the pompousness of national and
individual vanity combined. "When I was on board the Audacious"--
for a long time, was almost the invariable exordium to the fore-
top Captain's most cursory remarks. It is often the custom of
men-of-war's-men, when they deem anything to be going on wrong