I shall be considered to have done right as a man and to a brother officer in affliction. My heart could not stand it, and so the thing must rest." Accordingly Calder was allowed to take the Prince of Wales home, and Nelson, covetous as he was of victory, and convinced as he was that" numbers only can annihilate," parted with a 90-gun ship when he knew that the enemy's force was superior to his own. Such an act of intrepid generosity, generous even to the verge of quixotism, was characteristic of Nelson alone. No other man would have dared to do it. No other man would have been forgiven for doing it. Nor did it end in spirit even there. As the Victory was going into action, Nelson still thought kindly of the man whose only function in history is to afford a contrast to himself. "Hardy," he said, "what would poor Sir Robert Calder give to be with us now!"

This, his ruling passion of loving-kindness and tenderness of heart, was strong even in death. Just as he would not go on board the Seahorse at Teneriffe lest Mrs. Fremantle should be alarmed, so, as he was carried below at Trafalgar after receiving his death wound, he covered his face and stars with his handkerchief in order that, as Beatty, who tells the story, says, " he might be conveyed to the cock-pit at this crisis unnoticed by the crew." There at this supreme moment, still thinking of others and not of himself, and with "Thank God, I have done my duty" on his lips, let us leave him in all the majesty of a great hero's death. There is but one Nelson.

IN

DUNCAN1

the middle of the eighteenth century a Member of Parliament became known to his contemporaries as "Single Speech Hamilton." On the memorable occasion which gave an opposition to the House of Commons, and the seals of a Secretary of State to the elder Fox, while it drew from Pitt one of the most famous of his speeches and quite the most celebrated of his metaphors, William Gerard Hamilton delivered his first and only speech. "He spoke for the first time," says Horace Walpole, who heard him," and was at once perfection." He never spoke in the House of Commons again. "Yet a volume he has left of maxims for debating in the House of Commons proves," says Lord Stanhope, "how deeply and carefully he had made that subject his study." The unique effort of the debate on the Address in 1755-which placed Hamilton for the moment almost on a level with Pitt-was at once the fruit and the proof of the speaker's mastery of Parliamentary Logic. He spoke well because he had studied the whole art of parliamentary fence and fathomed all its secrets. He seemed to flash across the parliamentary sky like a sudden and brilliant meteor glowing only for a moment. But the Parliamentary Logic reveals the source from which the meteor derived its lustre, and proves that its fuel was not exhausted, though it never glowed again.

As Gerard Hamilton was called "Single Speech Hamilton," so Admiral Duncan, the victor of Camperdown, might well be called "Single Action Duncan." But the parallel must not be pressed too closely. The parlia1 Quarterly Review, January 1899.

mentary combatant well equipped for the fray need never wait long for his opportunity. As a rule, he is prompt and even importunate to seize it. The naval commander, on the other hand, cannot make his opportunities. He can only take them when they come. "His object," as Nelson said in a pregnant sentence, "is to embrace the happy moment which now and then offers-it may be this day, not for a month, and perhaps never." For this his whole life must be a preparation. With an instant readiness to perceive, seize, and improve the happy moment when it comes, he must be content even if it never does come. To many a mute, inglorious Nelson it may never come. To Duncan it came at the battle of Camperdown. But it only came when he had been more than fifty years in the service. In this he at once resembles and differs from Hamilton. Each was master of his art. But Hamilton found his opportunity early in life and never sought another, though he might have found them by the score. Opportunity constantly passed Duncan by, and only found him at last when his course was wellnigh run. The two were alike in readiness of preparation, but unlike in felicity of opportunity. Hamilton was "Single Speech Hamilton" by choice; Duncan was Single Action Duncan " by necessity. Hamilton lives only in a nickname; Duncan lives in the memory of a splendid victory.

And yet he does not all live. No contemporary biographer thought his life worthy of detailed record, and naval historians have for the most part treated his great victory as an insignificant episode in the vast drama of Napoleonic war-an episode which raised no strategic issues of more than subordinate moment. At last, just a hundred years after the battle of Camperdown was fought and won, the present Earl of Camperdown, the great-grandson of the victor who never himself bore the title which commemorates his victory, has laudably sought to place on record such memorials of his great ancestor as may still be salvaged from the wreck of time.