T HE finest action is the better for a piece of

purple," says Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his essays ; and he goes on to commend the fact that the old Admirals were not ashamed to do their great things in a great way. Nothing could be finer, for example, than the fashion in which Admiral Duncan clung to his post off the Texel, blockading the whole Dutch fleet with his single ship, when his own squadron had mutinied and left him. If the Dutch ships came out, Duncan knew his flagship would be sunk, and he explained with Scottish exactitude to one of his officers : "I have taken the depth of the water, and when the 'Venerable' goes down my flag will still fly." Duncan's resolve was as obstinate and as dauntless as that of any sea-dog who ever harried Spaniards under Drake. There is, indeed, a touch of Viking fierce- ness about it; and yet, as Stevenson notes, the speaker of these gallant words was "a Scotch member of Parliament with a smattering of the classics, a cocked flat of great size, and flannel underclothing." The most Memorable sea-duel ever fought was that between the Shannon' and the Chesapeidre: But when the American ship came out to fight, with flags gleaming from peak and topmasts, a flame of gaudy colours, the Shannon' ,flew a sea-bleached and solitary ensign from her peak. "Mayn't we have three ensigns, Sir, as she has ? " re- monstrated one discontented Jack. "No," said Broke, "we have, always been an unassuming ahip " ; and, the very simplicity of his words furnishes a "piece of purple" as splendid as that of the deeds that followed them. Jack, it May be added, has always a sense of colour even should the quarter- deck lack it, and delights not only in doing a fine thing, but

in doing it with a flourish. Stevenson, in proof of this, quotes the story of the four marines of the ' Wager ' who, after the vessel's wreck, were left behind on the island. The boats could not carry the whole of the shipwrecked crew, and these men volunteered to be left. It was worse than offering for a forlorn hope ; but as the boats pulled off the four self- doomed marines stood at attention on the beach and cried "God bless the King ! " They were never heard of again, but they did a grand thing with a grand air. It adds a thrill to the story of the Birkenhead,' again, to read how the men who stayed in the sinking slap to perish, that the women might have a chance, stood quietly in line, and as if on parade. This was the piece of purple that gave a fine action a fine look.

Perhaps beyond any sea-battle known to history Trafalgar is memorable for the streak of purple which, so to speak, runs through it ; and certainly the matchless hold Nelson has on the common imagination is due to the heroic look he stamped on the great actions of his life. It is the " Nelson touch" ! In look and stature, indeed, he mocked all the ordinary signs of greatness. What contrast in personal appearance could be more dramatic than that offered by Hardy, with the square shoulders and the massive figure of a Life-Guardsman, walking to and fro on the Victory's' quarter-deck, with the smoke and thunder of Trafalgar filling the whole landscape, and beside him Nelson, a little one-armed, one-eyed figure, which hardly reached the shoulder of his huge comrade ? But Nelson's keen look and thin, shot-scarred, but fine-drawn features, through which shone a spirit as eager, and generous, and daring as ever dwelt in human body, exerted a sort of compelling magic on all about him. He carried with him an atmosphere charged with fine elements. He thought in large terms. He had a vision for the noble side of things, and gave a sort of knightly aspect to all his exploits. He could plan a battle with the ice-cold clearness of Marlborough's brain ; but in the execution of it he bore himself with the fire and chivalry, say, of Sidney or of Bayard.

It is this combination of clearest intellect in the substance of his strategy, and of what may be called the "grand air" in the execution of it, which gives to Nelson his undying attraction. Experts only can do justice to the terrible completeness of the great sea-captain's battle-plan ; "the man in the street" can admire the fire and swiftness ot its execution. At Cape St. Vincent the fate of the bath_ trembled in the scales when the Spanish flagship, the huge Santissima Trinidada,' with the other great ships in the Spanish van, swung round, and, bringing the wind with them, came on a course which would take them past the rear of the British line, and so make the broken Spanish fleet a unit again. It was at that moment that the little Captain' suddenly swung out of the British line to leeward, doubled back with a swift curve, and bore up straight in the path of that cluster of great ships coining on with bellying canvas and gleaming flags. The experts, when the battle is over, can appreciate Nelson's swiftness of vision and the genius of his counter-stroke. He read the plan of the Spanish Admiral with a glance as sure and true as that of Napoleon himself ; and he made, without orders and without a moment's pause, the move that arrested it. Here was the display of a great captain's genius. The ordinary reader does not perhaps realise the tactical merits of Nelson's stroke; but the spectacle of that single British ship, with a decision so swift and a daring so high, swinging from the line to meet half a fleet of hostile ships, each one twice as big as herself, in single combat, bah burned itself in on the general imagination. It was a thing intrinsically great, done in a great way. So at the Nile, the cold plan of the fight is a masterpiece, worthy of Napoleon at his best. Nelson attained at every stage of the fight, and in a fashion nothing less than perfect, the end of all generalship,—an overwhelming superiority in force over his enemy at the fighting-point. The story of the Nile is really the tale -of how each ship of the French line' was destroyed in turn by the fire of two English ships. But the reader does not dwell on the skill of the plan which secured this end; what arrests and kindles his imagina- tion is the high daring, the unpausing swiftness, of Nelson's stroke. The French, theugh they had themselves created a new grammar in war, and Napoleon had taught them how to annihilate time, yet never dreamed of the swiftness of Nelson's onfall. Night was falling, the soundings were strange, the French line was anchored in a carefully chosen position. And yet the British ships came on with an ilan and decision as complete as though they had every yard of their course charted, and not an enemy in sight. Here was a battle-plan as coldly perfect as a demonstration in Euclid, but in the doing of it there was an air so gallant, a movement so swift, that even to the eye of an artist, who judges only by the test of the picturesque, the Nile is one of the memorable fights of all history.

And this is Nelson's signature on the greatest of all sea-battles, Trafalgar. Nelson's battle-plan, on any reading, is incomparably fine. How far he varied the idea of his famous memorandum of October 7th to meet the actual conditions of the fight on October 21st may be left to the experts. The essential features of the great fight are plain to even the uninstructed eye. Nelson's lee column under Collingwood was to pierce the Franco-Spanish line at a given point, cutting off and destroying roughly one-third. Nelson, as his task, undertook that in the execution of this business Collingwood should be "as little interrupted as possible." Nelson's objective was that which is always the end of the highest generalship : the destruction of his enemy in detail, and by overpowering force. He commanded the weaker fleet of the two; yet the skill of his leadership made the weaker fleet overwhelmingly superior at the actual fighting- point. But let the audacious daring of Nelson's plan be realised. Collingwood, with fifteen ships, was to cut off and destroy one-third—say twelve ships—of the enemy's force. Nelson, with the weather column of only twelve ships, was to keep two-thirds of the enemy's fleet—say twenty-four ships—occupied while Collingwood "finished his business " ! The skill—or rather the genius—with which Nelson carried his own part of the plan into effect is brought out with great clearness in the admirable study of Trafalgar which the Times has lately published. Nelson before closing with the enemy made a feint of altering his course to the north ; then, later, swung to starboard and opened fire. That feint puzzled, not to say paralysed, the enemy. It left them in doubt as to the point at which the ' Victory ' was about to strike. It was the flourish of a fine swordsman before he thrusts,—a flourish which leaves his antagonist in doubt as to what guard is necessary. The enemy's van and centre were, in this fashion, "contained "—held in doubt, and paralysed—by the un- certainty of Nelson's stroke. "This," says the writer in the Times, "was as fine a piece of subtle tactics as was ever ex- hibited in a sea fight, a combination of psychological insight and tactical dexterity and rapidity such as no man but Nelson ever displayed." But "the man in the street" does not see, or appreciate, the finesse of the stroke. It is the broad aspect of the great fight which delights him. This is not a fight after the fashion of the leisurely sea-battles of an earlier generation, —two great fleets drawn out in swaying lines, and slowly adjusting themselves, ship to ship, for the battle. On the lazy ground-swell, fanned by the soft wind, the Franco-Spanish ships, a double chain of sea-giants, picturesquely threatening in every link, might well delight the imagination of an artist. But the slow approach of the English ships in almost parallel columns—" columns" that, in the moment of contact with the enemy, melted into a crowd of three-deckers, pushing into the enemy's line with utmost speed—this scene for majesty, for daring, for all that can stir the imagination, is unsurpassed in history. The purple streak in Trafalgar is the fashion of the British onfall, the most perfect expression of cool daring conceivable.

But the whole battle, as watched from Nelson's standpoint, and judged by the part Nelson plays in it, is in the loftiest key. It moves with the stateliness, and even with the solemnity, of a Greek drama. Nelson goes into the battle

with a certainty that it is his last. "God bless you, Black- wood," he says, as he parts with his favourite frigate captain, " I shall never speak to you again." He dresses himself for death as for a feast. He insists on wearing his medals. "In honour," he says, "I have won them, and in honour I will die

with them." At the moment when the fleets are about to close, and his work as a battle-leader is practically finished, he spells out from the 'Victory's' topmast the immortal signal which strikes, so to speak, the keynote of the stormy brain."

orchestra of the guns just about to open. That keynote is the great word "duty," and following it is Nelson's last and most

characteristic signal : "Engage the enemy more closely." Within three hours from the dictation of that greatest of all battle-signals Nelson was lying in the gloom of the ' Victory's ' cockpit a dying man. He had looked his last on sea and sky and on the faces of his comrades. The picture of the great seaman dying at the moment of his proudest triumph, with the thunders of Trafalgar in his ears, is worthy of Greek drama. The genius of Sophocles or Aeschylus might even have suggested the appeal of the dying sailor to the ship that carried his flag, and that was shaken every moment by the concussion of its own guns : " Oh ! 'Victory,' Victory," whispered Nelson, "how you distract my poor It is the high key in which Nelson's whole life was pitched which is the secret of his hold on the popular imagination. He did great things in a great way. His ordinary speech was shot through with a spirit which makes his sayings memorable. "Nothing," he was accustomed to say, "can stop the courage of English seamen " ; "Duty is the great business in a sea officer"; "Our country will, I believe, sooner forgive an officer for attacking his enemy than for omitting to do it " ; "We are enough in England if true to ourselves"; "Small measures produce only small results; the boldest measures are the safest"; "I have not been brought up in

the school of fear " ; "I boast of nothing but my zeal; in that I will give way to no man upon earth." How clearly a brave

spirit shines out in such utterances as these !

Nelson's body, a handful of heroic dust, sleeps in the crypt of St. Paul's, with the ceaseless tumult of London streets

about it. From the summit of the great column in Trafalgar Square his statue, of heroic scale, lifted high above the city

roofs, looks southwards, as though watching the skyline for an enemy's topsails; and the statue is an unconscious symbol.

Nelson will be always visible to the eyes of the English- speaking race, and always as a figure heroic, the highest

expression of the fighting spirit of his race. In George Meredith's fine lines-

" We hear our Seaman's call

In the roll of battles won; For he is England's admiral Till the setting of her sun."