WE are unfortunately among those who did not esteem the
Naval Sketch Book a very amusing production ; and Sailors and Saints*, like its predecessor, has nothing belonging to it better than its title. Pages half occupied by dammees and nautical terms, and whole chapters describing, as accurately and as tiresomely as HAMILTON MOORE himself, the mode in which a ship is worked, may perhaps amuse the writer, by reviving in his mind scenes in which he has berm' a part ; but they are not to our taste, and to read them cannot, we should think, interest even sailors. Other per-
* Sailors and Saints, or Matrimonial Manveuvres. By the Authors of the Naval Sketch Book. :3 vols. London, le29. Colburn. sons will not understand them. Those who desire to learn sea slang, may study this book instead of a marine dictionary ; but we should
prefer the latter. It would be unmixed with that sentimental nonsense to which the sea slang of Sailors and Saints is allied. We object also to that language as being quite out of character. As far as our knowledge of naval officers extends, they are now, and have been for a quarter of a century, as polished and well- behaved men on shore as any in the country. Captains and Admirals in SMOLLETT'S time might have indulged in ribaldry, but they have now laid it aside. One of the principal characters in Sailors and Saints is a Captain Crank, who is a copy of Hawser Trunnion, modernized. He reminds us of the picture of an old warrior, whose ample and bare brow has been adorned with a modern scratch. He is a sort of dandified naval captain of the last century. There is, we are quite sure, no such person, nor any thing like him now in existence ; and the authors, in pretending to give us naval sketches, have only vamped up an old caricature of SMOLLETT.S. Another of the sailors is Tom Tiller ; who is, in like • manner, a copy of Tom Pipes, without his artless and fearless simplicity. The rest of the sailors are a Lieutenant Burton, the hero of the history, who is a very commonplace novel personage, listed in his Majesty's service, with his Captain Staunch, a steady determined officer, and a Sir Harry Driver. The chief Saints are Mrs. Crank, the Captain's sister, who lives with him, and a Methodist parson ; to which we may add a Doctor Senna, who is saint or sinner as he is in company with the Captain or his sister. Mrs. Crank's daughter Emily is the heroine, and of course captivates Burton. From such materials the authors might have made a more amusing book. We have sought almost in vain through the first volume, the only one we have had time to ex- amine, for a readable extract. Here, however, is one. A boat, in passing across the bows of the Spitfire, is upset ; and the author thus describes what ensued :- " With the exception of the alarm of fire, there is no cry, perhaps, which excites a more general sympathy and activity, than that of ' a man overboard.f The over-eager desire to render assistance, in such in- stances, frequently defeats itself, and endangers the life which it was in- tended to preserve. The forecastle was instantly crowded with swarms of men, who were destined to be mere spectators of a catastrophe they could not alleviate. The hall-room preparations occupied so much of the ship, that they were all huddled together en masse ; and so much attention had been paid to the neatness of her appearance, that scarcely a rope was left upon deck to heave overboard. The alarm of all was the greater, from discovering, for the first time, that not a single boat I: had been left with the ship, having been all despatched for the expected visitors.
" Burton was among the first to jump in the fore-chains. Paralysed with horror, he beheld a sight which never fails to appeal with electric effect to the sympathy and courage of.p young man—a lovely female perishing. But what was his horror, when he perceived that female was—his own Emily ; who, supported for a moment by the buoyancy of her clothes, was fast whelming in the waves, and borne along in the tide with fearful rapidity.
".With that presence of mind peculiar to him he "rushed out of the chains, seized a grating, flung off his coat and shoes, and, full dressed as he was, precipitated buth grating and himself over the side ; and was barely in time to catch at her long dishevelled locks, which alone were now visible on the surface of the water, and save ;her from sinking, to rise no more.
" Courage is ever contagious : already a young midshipman had plunged overboard, bearing in his teeth a long tow-line to their assist- ance. In this expectation he was doomed to be deceived, as the line, though veered out rapidly by a seaman in the chains, in sinking formed a bight, or semicircular bend, which was borne by the tide in an oblique direction to his course, neutralizing all his efforts to attain his object. " All the efforts of love and gallantry, however, must have proved in - effectual, had not one cf the boats despatched ashore now appeared within hail I"
Though the work is deficient in sustained interest, it abounds in criticism. The authors pride themselves very much on their accu- rate use of sea phrases ; and they censure very freely some pas- sages of another author—Mr. COOPER we believe, who is not so area a master as they are of this peculiar language. There are some strictures also on the naval service ; and an eminent Parlia- mentary character is ridiculed for his virtues. Sea phrases, when their meaning is obvious, and they are sparingly used, in a work of fiction, may be praised ; but in this book they are much too numerous, and though the use of them may display the authors' knowledge of their profession, they do not constitute " Tales of the Sea."
f Naval anomaly—man or woman all the same. The urgency of the danger ad- mits no designation of sex. * This practice, we are sorry to say, has been too often encouraged in vessels of war. In Benbow's time it was considered a punishable offenee.
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