cause of Dibdin failing to enlist strongly the sympathies of real
blue-water tars; and the very same reason, with some modifications,
prevents all prose works, descriptive of sea-life, from being
favourably received by practical mariners. We have heard the
'sailoring' portions of the finest works of Cooper and others scoffed
at by seamen; and the very best book on sea-life ever written, Dana's
_Two Years before the Mast_, is held in no sort of esteem by the very
men for whose benefit the author avows he wrote it, and whose life he
has so vividly, and, as _we_ think, faithfully described. Every sailor
we have questioned concerning that book--and there are few sailors who
have not read it--declared that he 'thought nothing of it;' and that
all his messmates laughed at it as much as himself. They say that Dana
'makes too much' of everything, and that he gives false and
exaggerated notions of life on shipboard. We personally deny this; but
sailors, as a body, are such prosaic people, that they will make no
allowance whatever for the least amplification of bald matter of fact.
If the author dilates at all on his own feelings and impressions, they
chuckle and sneer; and if he errs in the least--or the compositor for
him--in his nautical details, they cry out that he is a know-nothing,
a marine, a horse-jockey, a humbug. To please seamen, any book about
their profession must be written precisely in the lucid and
highly-imaginative style of a log-book--their sole standard of
literary excellence.

Sailors are shrewd and sensitive, enough in some respects. They do not
like to be flattered, and cannot bear to be caricatured; and they feel
that Dibdin has--unconsciously--been guilty of both towards them.
According to his songs, sailors lead a life of unalloyed fun and
frolic. He tells us nothing about their slavery when afloat, nothing
about the tyranny they are frequently subjected to; and in his days, a