Book Description

Excerpt from A Sailor's Garland The sailor has been expressed for us with perfect art and perfect truth, though he himself may complain of the treatment he has received. The poets have not loved him. They have not been attracted by him. They have dismissed him, not with a shudder, but with a volley of his own oaths or with a scrap of his own song, as a sort of monster, a sort of sea-bear, a sort of a bawling rough Commodore Trunnion. So far as I know there are not half a dozen attractive naval characters, created and celebrated in poetry or in prose fiction, prior to the early nineteenth century. If a poet or a novelist desired a common seaman or a sea captain in his art, he followed the type of Chaucer's Shipman or of Shakespeare's boat swain for the one, and that of Congreve's young Ben or Smollett's Commodore, or Edmund Thompson's Captain Mizen for the other. Heywood's sea captains, at the inn, are perhaps the best we have prior to Miss Austen and Captain Marryat, though our fiction makers have always done well with pirates, as with Captain Ward and Captain Roberts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.