yearn over his brother, and sternly said: 'If none of you will accuse him, I must be his accuser.' Humphrey was dismissed from the service. It is affecting to know how painfully Blake missed his familiar presence during his sick and lonely passage homewards, when the hand of death was upon that noble heart. To Humphrey he bequeathed the greater part of his property.
In the rare intervals of private life which he enjoyed on shore, Blake also compels our sincere regard. When released for awhile from political and professional duties, he loved to run down to Bridgewater for a few days or weeks, and, as his biographer says, with his chosen books, and one or two devout and abstemious friends, to indulge in all the luxuries of seclusion. 'He was by nature self-absorbed and taciturn. His morning was usually occupied with a long walk, during which he appeared to his simple neighbours to be lost in profound thought, as if working out in his own mind the details of one of his great battles, or busy with some abstruse point of Puritan theology. If accompanied by one of his brothers, or by some other intimate friend, he was still for the most part silent. Always good-humoured, and enjoying sarcasm when of a grave, high class, he yet never talked from the loquacious instinct, or encouraged others so to employ their time and talents in his presence. Even his lively and rattling brother Humphrey, his almost constant companion when on shore, caught, from long habit, the great man's contemplative and self-communing gait and manner; and when his friends rallied him on the subject in after-years, he used to say, that he had caught the trick of silence while walking by the admiral's side in his long morning musings on Knoll Hill. A plain dinner satisfied his wants. Religious conversation, reading, and the details of business, generally filled up the evening until supper-time; after family prayersalways pronounced by the general himselfhe would invariably call for his cup of sack and a dry crust of bread, and while he drank two or three horns of Canary, would smile and chat in his own dry manner with his friends and domestics, asking minute questions about their neighbours and acquaintance; or when scholars or clergymen shared his simple repast, affecting a droll anxietyrich and pleasant in the conqueror of Trompto prove, by the aptness and abundance of his quotations, that, in becoming an admiral, he had not forfeited his claim to be considered a good classic.'
The care and interest with which he looked to the well-being of his humblest followers, made him eminently popular in the fleet. He was always ready to hear complaints and to rectify grievances. When wounded at the battle of Portland, and exhorted to go on shore for repose and proper medical treatment, he refused to seek for himself the relief which he had put in the way of his meanest comrade. Even at the early period of his cruise against the Cavalier corsairs of Kinsale, such was Blake's popularity, that numbers of men were continually joining him from the enemy's fleet, although he offered them less pay, and none of that licence which they had enjoyed under Prince Rupert's flag. They gloried in following a leader sans peur et sans reproche one with whose renown the whole country speedily rangthe renown of a man who had revived the traditional glories of the English navy, and proved that its meteor flag could 'yet terrific burn.'
SUMMER LODGINGS
An annual process analogous to this takes place in our own country. In spring, we begin to look wistfully at the garden, to watch the opening of the lettuces, and count the colours of the pansies. As the season advances, we wander into the fields, examine curiously the thin grass, and turn an admiring eye towards the green hills in the distance. As May breaks upon us in sunlight, though the east wind is still chill, we half persuade ourselves that this really
is the season of love and sentiment; and when the month ripens into June, when the grass beneath our feet actually deserves the name of a carpet, when the trees are rich and umbrageous, when the birds are in full song, and the roses in full blowthen the hitherto indefinite longing of our heart acquires strength and purpose. The dry streets look unnatural; the formal lines of houses offend the taste; the air is close and hot; the younger children look pale, and their elder sisters languish. The month is at length out, and we wonder how we have survived it. The thing can no longer be borne: the town looks and breathes like a pest-house; while hill-sides glimmer in our waking dreams, broad seas stretch away till they are lost in the golden light
But the country? Where is the country? That is the puzzle. In our youth, we knew many a quiet village, many a fine beach, many a sheltered bay, where one might wander, or swim, or muse, or rusticate in any way he chose. The village has grown into a town; the beach is lined with villas; the bay swarms with vessels, and its shores with population. Every eligible spot on the coast becomes the resort of country-goers, till it is no longer the country. All local advantages are taken advantage of, till they disappear. The citizen, charmed with the countryness of the spot, builds his box by the water-side; the speculator runs up lines of houses; a handsome inn rises in the midst; and benevolent individuals hasten to the new centre of attraction, loaded with every kind of commodity men stand in need of, and are likely to buy. Here, in Scotland, on the Clyde, which is the grand sanatorium of the east as well as the west country, this process of change is remarkable. The once wildly beautiful shores, wherever there is not a town or a village, are dotted with trim white villas, glimmering here and there among the trees. The angles of the lochs, where these diverge from the parent stream, are covered with houses. The Gair Loch, which we remember as one of the sweetest mysteries of a mountain lake whose banks ever echoed to the songs of poetry and love, is a snug suburban retreat. The entrance of the Holy Loch, and of the dark and awful Loch Long, are fortified against the spirit of nature by groups of streets. At the heretofore quiet village of Dunoon, slumbering at the foot of its almost obliterated castle, you might lose yourself in the wilderness of new habitations. Gourock, on the opposite side, where in our boyhood the fairies disported round the Kempuck Stane, is a bustling town, with a suburb stretching along the Clyde, nearly as long as the long town of Kirkaldy, on the Forth; and at Largs, the barrows of the ancient Danes have become the cellars of the sons of little men, who confine spirits in them, as the prophet Solomon used to do, with a sealed cork. The once solitary island of Cumbrae is the town of Milport; the hoary ruins of Rothsay Castle are almost buried in a congeries of seaport streets and lanes; and, smoking, sputtering, and flapping their water-wings, scores of steamers ply in endless succession among these and a multitude of other places of renown.