the half-pay thereof. He had been celebrated
all over the world in his time for deeds of
daring and chivalrous bravery; but that had
been a very long time ago; and the ungrateful
generation among whom his latest years
—those that were to be but labour and sorrow—
were passed, celebrated only his
eccentricities and ignored, or were indifferent to
his glory. This is the way of the world, my
Christian friend. When you and I come to
be old men and—should we ever have given
the world cause to talk about us—we shall
find that the books we have written, the
pictures we have painted, or the statues we have
hewn, will be dismissed to oblivion with a
good natured contempt as things meritorious
enough in their way, but quite out of date;
should we be worth paragraphs, or anecdotes,
they will have reference to the redness of our
noses, the patterns of our trowsers, our manner
of eating peas with our knives, our habit
of putting the left leg foremost when we walk,
or our assumed fondness for cold rum and
water. The Duke of Marlborough's petty
avarice and hagglings with the Bath-chairmen
were talked about long after the
conqueror of Blenheim was forgotten, and the
nation had even grumbled about paying for
the palace it had voted him in the first
outburst of its gratitude. Lord Peterborough
walking from market in his blue ribbon, with
a fowl under one arm, and a cabbage under
the other, quite threw into the shade Lord
Peterborough the hero of Almanza. Whenever
the name of the Marquis of Granby
occurs to us now-a-days, it is in connection
with the Incorporated Association of Licensed
Victuallers, with foreign wines, beer, and
tobacco—not with battles won, or sieges
successfully conducted. Whose aquiline nose,
white ducks, and hat-saluting fingers, were
household words in London to the populace,
who had forgotten Waterloo, when they
smashed the windows of Apsley House with
stones, because its owner was an enemy to
Reform? Whose children grin now at the
caricatured presentments of the prominent
nose and plaid trowsers of the man who was
the greatest orator, the greatest advocate, the
greatest reformer of the law, England has
ever seen, and who thirty years since shook
this realm from end to end by the thunder
of his eloquence, and dashed down walls of
corruption, one after another, with his
impetuous hand? The world is as ungrateful,
as fickle, as petulant as a woman. I
warrant Omphale rapped the fingers of
Hercules when, sitting at her feet a-spinning,
he happened to ravel the flax. He who had
vanquished the Nemæan lion, and quelled the
Erymanthian boar, was forgotten in the careless
spinner. So it was with the old gentleman
whom I knew in Paris fifteen years ago.
People talked of the strange fancy he had
of leading an old white horse about the
streets, on which he never rode; much
merriment was excited by the rumour that he
slept with his head through a hole in a
blanket—(I am not exaggerating)—the quid
nuncs of the Rue St. Honoré and the Champs
Elysées were infinitely amused at his strange
ways, his loud and rambling talk, his general
oddity of manner; very few people cared to
remember that before most of them were born
he was famous over the whole world as the
English Commodore Sir SIDNEY SMITH, the
heroic defender of Acre, the scourge of the
French navy—from the lofty three-decker to
the smallest chasse-marée,—and nearly the only
man for whom the great Napoleon—the impassible,
ambitious, who no more deigned to love or
hate men, with him, or against him, any more
than Mr. Staunton, the chess-player, loves or
hates the pawns in his game—condescended
to entertain a violent personal dislike. Sir
Sidney Smith used coolly to declare that
Napoleon was jealous of him. It is certain
that he annoyed and chafed the Great Man
horribly, and in Egypt drove him to the
perpetration of a very sorry joke, having
positively challenged him to single combat, which
Napoleon declined, till—having rather an
exalted idea of the " foeman worthy of his
steel "—he could produce the ghost of the
great Duke of Marlborough.

Sir Sidney Smith died in Paris; but it is
not with his death or latter days that I have
to do. I wish to tell the story of his escape
from certain chambers which he occupied in
the Temple, while he was yet the famous
commodore, admired by Europe, and hated by
the French Directory, and especially by
General Bonaparte. How much of strict
historic truth there may be in the story, it is
not for me to say. The journals of the period
tell pretty nearly the same tale; but even
newspapers will occasionally err, and even
the buckets of grave history writers often
stop short of the bottom of the well of
verity.

Sir Sidney Smith, taken prisoner in a
daring cutting-out expedition on the coast of
Brittany, was confined in the prison of the
Temple in Paris, in the year seventeen
hundred and ninety-eight. Some idea may be
formed of the importance which the republican
government attached to his capture and
detention to the fact, first, that the Directory
refused to liberate him in exchange for M.
Bergeret, a post-captain in the French navy,
and again, on another occasion, positively
refused to receive as an equivalent for his
person no fewer than twelve thousand French
prisoners! A man worth ten thousand pounds
is something; but a sea captain not to be
bought for twelve thousand fighting men is,
indeed, rich and rare.

Unfortunately even distinction has its
embarrassments, and such was the store set
by the safe keeping of Sir Sidney by his
captors, that his confinement was of the most
rigorous description. Verdun or Biche was
good enough for ordinary prisoners of war; but
the redoubtable commodore was transferred