the Third's Lords of the Admiralty. This contract was the thin end
of that wedge which eventually split the mighty oak block
of Government patronage into three-deckers and ships of the line;
which did good service under Pellew, Parker, Nelson, Hood;
which exfoliated and ramified into huge dockyards at Plymouth,
Portsmouth, and Sheerness, and bore, as its buds and flowers,
countless barrels of measly pork and maggoty biscuit. The sole aim
of the coarse, pushing and hard-headed son of Dick Devine was to make money.
He had cringed and crawled and fluttered and blustered, had licked
the dust off great men's shoes, and danced attendance in
great men's ante-chambers. Nothing was too low, nothing too high for him.
A shrewd man of business, a thorough master of his trade,
troubled with no scruples of honour or of delicacy, he made money rapidly,
and saved it when made. The first hint that the public received
of his wealth was in 1796, when Mr. Devine, one of the shipwrights
to the Government, and a comparatively young man of forty-four or thereabouts,
subscribed five thousand pounds to the Loyalty Loan raised
to prosecute the French war. In 1805, after doing good, and it was hinted
not unprofitable, service in the trial of Lord Melville, the Treasurer
of the Navy, he married his sister to a wealthy Bristol merchant,
one Anthony Frere, and married himself to Ellinor Wade, the eldest daughter
of Colonel Wotton Wade, a boon companion of the Regent, and uncle
by marriage of a remarkable scamp and dandy, Lord Bellasis. At that time,
what with lucky speculations in the Funds--assisted, it was whispered,
by secret intelligence from France during the stormy years
of '13, '14, and '15--and the legitimate profit on his Government contracts,
he had accumulated a princely fortune, and could afford to live
in princely magnificence. But the old-man-of-the-sea burden
of parsimony and avarice which he had voluntarily taken upon him
was not to be shaken off, and the only show he made of his wealth