Famous Ships of the Btitish Navy. By W. H. Davenport
Adams. (James Hogg and Sons.)—The author seems to have intended this work as a stimulant to lads intended for the Navy, and it is, perhaps, well adapted to excite the nautical notion that a ship is a kind of in- telligent being—an idea which seems to bo inseparable from good sea- manship. But the plan is, from a literary point of view, not a good one. There is no connection between one part of a ship's history and another. Every time she is re-commissioned she receives a new captain, and, after all, when Mr. Adams writes the history of a vessel he must write about the men who have commanded her, whose exploits are thus presented to us in a fragmentary way—now an incident which occurred on board this vessel, and then a chapter or two further on an incident which oc- curred on board some other. This objection, however, does not apply to vessels like the Centurion or Golden Hind, in which Anson and Drake sailed round the world, or to the famous story of the Bounty. Mr. Adams, moreover, has the knack of selecting the kind of incidents which boys love, and of telling his tales as they like to have them told, and if he had no other merit than that of printing for them, at full length, Dibden's splendid old ballad of the Arethusa, he would have redeemed far greater faults than any with which we have to charge him. There is a valuable appendix by Mr. Barnaby, on the construction of the Warrior and Black Prince.
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