the Channel with a broom at his mast-head.
There was a dash of humour in the Dutchman;
and they were wont, as the old
pamphlets constantly assert, to keep up their
courage with "brandy-wine;" whence came
the phrase "Dutch courage," and whence,
doubtless, Van Tromp was "elevated " as well
ns his broom. But there was a very awful
day coming off soon, for the battle of Portland
took place in February—it being now the
spring of 1653—in which the English and
Dutch had the most terrible naval contest of
modern times. The Dutch had their Van
Tromp, Evertz, De Ruyter, Floritz, and De
Wilde, present; the English, their Blake,
Deane, Penn, and Lawson. This battle lasted
three days. The Dutch lost seventeen or
eighteen men-of-war and a large fleet of
merchant-ships. The English loss in ships
was slight. But both sides lost men terribly;
the Dutch had seven captains killed, for
example, and the English, three. Blake himself
was wounded severely.

Such were the exploits which Blake
performed in the Channel, and no man did his
work more thoroughly; for, after one more
fight, De Witt told the Assembly of the States
that the English were masters both of them,
and of the seas. The Dutch had calculated that
some disruption would follow after Cromwell's
seizure of power; but, "to prevent foreigners
from fooling us," was, as has been said already,
Blake's leading notion—and his eminence and
our English success he owed to the noble
fidelity with which he stuck to it. After
blockading the coasts of Holland in an ill-
provided squadron, he was carried on shore
and lay at home, ill with a dangerous fever.
The western breezes gradually brought him
round, and he had an interval of seclusion near
Bridgewater, where the imaginative eye may
behold him, loitering about the fields, pensive,
taciturn, waking into good-humour out of his
meditative and somewhat gloomy abstraction.
On the whole Blake was a melancholy man,
with all beautiful, affectionate qualities, but
with them all saddened somewhat. We may
think of him as with a shade of pedantry, but
with the pedantry of a Shandy. It ran in him
like the thread in the centre of the
dockyard rope, which is of one colour in one
dockyard, and one in another. There was a
black thread in the centre of his strong,
fine nature, which gave gloominess to his
piety, taciturnity to his manner. When he
was facetious he quoted the classics; doubtless
loving them for what Stoicism and
Puritanism have in common. Juvenal's grim
humour must have suited him admirably, and
the beautiful flashes of stoicism in Horace's
Odes.

When Cromwell determined to strike a
blow at Spain, Blake was sent southward in
the St. George, with twenty-four other sail,
carrying four thousand one hundred men, and
eight hundred and seventy-four guns. Penn
and Venables sailed for the West Indies.
Blake anchored at Cadiz, sailed to Leghorn,
and dragged from the terrified authorities
"instant redress" for the owners of vessels
which had been piratically sold there by
Rupert and Maurice. The very Pope's
Fiscal had to come down with twenty-thousand
pistoles. He brought the Dey of Tunis
to his senses in a terrible manner, and put
the whole Mediterranean to rights. The
Spanish War was now ripe; and on Blake's
return to England, he was appointed to the
Nazeby (February, 1656), and sailed again to
the southward. He had a most tedious
blockade to go through in hopes of catching
the Spanish silver fleets. At last they turned
up, and were taken after six hours contest,
under the eyes of their countrymen.
Eight-and-thirty waggon-loads of silver went rolling
along London streets, among universal jubilee,
and in due time were satisfactorily "coined
into money."

Blake's last great victory at Santa Cruz,
was perhaps the most remarkable action of his
career. The narrow harbour was like one
huge dragon's mouth. It was fortified by
line upon line of forts, by a regular castle, and
by men-of-war; it's horse-shoe-shaped
entrance bristled with power. Blake looked at
it— sailed right up to the mouth of it; and
stormed it with fire and shot, till it all burned
like one blazing house. It was a crowning
effort of supreme human daring, and ended
in triumphant victory, being received with
immense joy in London at a time when
England was supremely glorious in the eyes of all
Europe.

Blake received a letter from Cromwell,
the thanks of Parliament, and a jewel, as a
present of honour. But his health was now
gone; and he had lost everything but his
piety, that belonged to his power. Languishing
in a cabin, which was less comfortable
than admirals' cabins are now-a-days—he
frequently asked if England were yet in sight;
and the vessel was just entering Plymouth
Sound when he breathed his last. One may
suppose that a man so pious was anxious to
leave his bones in his native land: they did
lie there till the Restoration, when they were
disinterred, and "flung" somewhere, in
conformity with the manners of the period.

The following paragraph from the writer
of his "History," a "gentleman" who had
"been bred in his family," and whose book
was published before the middle of the
last century, gives a curious picture of his
manners:—

"The last thing he did, after he had given
his commands and word to his men, was to
pray with the above-mentioned Mr. Bear
(his servant); when that was done, he was
wont to say, 'Thomas, bring me the pretty
cup of sack;' he would then sit down, and
give Thomas liberty to do the same, and
inquire what news he had heard of his
Bridgewater men that day, and talk of the
people and affairs of the place. Then, eating