as can be seen at present, with the exception of the one irreparable mistake, nothing went wrong—nothing was done that ought not to have been done; everything was tested under the breaking strain of imminent death, and everything and every one was found to be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. Even in the suddenness and completeness of the catastrophe we have a certain consolation. We have at least demonstrated now beyond all gainsaying how irresistible a weapon is the ram of the "Camperdown." Of all the ironclads afloat there was none stronger, although there were one or two larger than the 66 Victoria." But at the first blow from the ram of her consort, a blow dealt by mischance, and without the calculated force and fury of war, the "Victoria" was crushed into irremediable ruin. No one after this can question the effective fighting value of the ram. Now, Great Britain has many rams at her disposal, many more rams than she had "Victorias," and the loss of the "Victoria" has heightened the face value of all the rams that to-day are flying the white ensign.

NOT ONLY MODERN IRONCLADS HAVE ACCIDENTS.

At first, no doubt, there was a disposition to exaggerate the significance of the evidence thus afforded as to the fragility of the modern ironclad. But, on second thoughts this was seen to be unjust. There is nothing exceptional or unusual about the capsizing of an ironclad. British men-of-war of the most ancient heart-of-oak pattern keeled over as suddenly as the "Victoria" with even less excuse. Mr. Froude, in Longman's Magazine, reminds us this very month how that, at the very beginning of our naval wars, when the British fleet were repelling a French attack, insolently delivered at the very gates of Portsmouth, one of our first fighting ships heeled over and sank, drowning all her crew. The loss of the "Mary Rose under the eyes of Henry the Eighth at Spithead, while the enemy was actually engaged in an attempt to destroy our navy and land on our shores, was a far greater disaster than the loss of the "Victoria." The story of the sinking of the " Mary Rose," told by Sir Peter Carewe, who witnessed it, may be recalled opportunely just now to remind us that as there were brave men before Agamemnon, so England had firstclass fighting ships that could turn bottom up before the 66 Victoria," and even before the "Royal

George":

"The Kynge hearing that the French galleys rowed upe and doune in the very haven of Portsmouth fretted, and his teethe stoode one and edge to see the braverye of his enemyes to come so neere his noose and be not able to encountre with thyme. . . It was the Kynge's pleasure to appoint Sir George Carewe to be Vice Admyrall and hade appoynted unto hyme a shippe named the 'Marye Rose,' which was as fyne a shippe, as stronge and as wellappoynted, as none better on the realme. The Kynge then toke his b ats and rowed to the lande. The sayles were no sooner hoysted but that the Marye Rose' beganne to heele, that is to leane on the one side. Sir George Carewe being then in his own shippe and seeinge the same called for the master of his shippe, and told him thereof and asked hyme what it mente? Who an

swered that yf she did heele she was lycke to be cast awaye. Then the sayd Sir Gawen passenge by the 'Marye Rose' called one to Sir George Carewe asking hyme how he did? Who answered that he had a sort of naves whom he could not rule. And it was not longe after but that the sayde' Marye Rose,' thus heeling more and more, was drowned with 700 men.”

Mr. Froude says that "the ports of the ship were open for action, her guns were run out, but, misled by the calm that prevailed, the crew had insufficiently secured them; the wind came up with a sudden sweep, and as the Mary Rose' was slightly heeled on one side, her hindmost tier of guns broke loose, rolled across the deck, and with their weight and momentum it depressed the leeward side so that the water rushed in at the open ports, filled the ship, and sunk her, with nearly every soul on board." In the very place where the “ Mary Rose" capsized in the sixteenth century, the "Royal George" heeled over in the eighteenth. Both these vessels, like the "Victoria," were ranked among the best of their time. Of the "Mary Rose," Sir Robert Howard, who commanded her in 1513, told King Hal she was "the noblest shipp at this time that, I trow, be in Christendom, the flower of all shippes that ever sayled." But this peerless vessel turned turtle and carried down to the bottom twice as many as those who went down in the "Victoria."

It is well to remember that, with the exception of the "Captain," there has been no great loss of human life in connection with any of our ironclads until the ramming of the "Victoria."

THE "VICTORIA" WAS A NOBLE WAR SHIP. It must also be borne in mind that although the "Victoria" went down rapidly before the stroke of the "Camperdown's" ram, she had proved her exceeding toughness and stability only the previous year, when, after grounding on a rock off the coast of Greece, she was got off without serious injury. If she was not like the "Mary Rose," "the flower of all shippes that ever sayled,” she was, all things considered, one of the most perfect specimens of the modern warship that ever carried an admiral's flag. Landsmen can only give with more or less precision the facts about her dimensions and her armament, but those who knew her and had many a time sailed in her-faced the storm in her, and hoped for nothing better than to have an opportunity of showing her prowess in the van of battle-mourn for her with a personal sorrow as if some dear friend or mistress had disappeared from the world. Her great guns will no more awake the echoes of fortress wall or sea-girt cliff with their thunder. In vain was she sheathed in massive armor seventeen inches in thickness and filled with water-tight compartments like a honeycomb. She has perished without ever having tasted the fierce joy of battle, or of having given or received either shot or shell. And yet, perhaps, who knows but that even in her last death plunge she may have done more for England and England's fleet than if, like the “Victory,” she had sailed the seas for forty years and carried Nelson's pennant at Trafalgar?

A SUPERB TEST OF THE JACK TAR.

For the name of the "Victoria" will ever be associated with a story that the nation will cherish as one of those precious records by which Empires live. It was all over in fifteen minutes, but that fifteen minutes will live in history as lives the Balaclava charge, which did not last much longer. The testing times of life seldom last long. The first dip of the litmus paper in the solution proves the existence of acid, and the first moment of a supreme crisis suffices for a test. And as it has been said that it was almost worth the enormous expenditure of the Crimean War to have the object lesson which was afforded by the charge of the Six Hundred-of the absolute readiness of the British soldier to ride "into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell "—so it may be said that it was almost worth while to lose the "Victoria" in order to have so superb an illustration of the mettle of our men. Death, in the old phrase, is the gate of life, but Death is more than that Death is the sovereign alchemist who assays the value of the coin struck in the mint of life. Death is the supreme test. Invincible in life, are our blue-jackets invincible also in death? Their drill goes like clock work by day and by night; their discipline is perfect by sea and by land. But how will it be when each individual, nay, when the whole ship's company with all its component weaknesses and shortcomings, is suddenly slung over an abyss yawning eighty fathoms deep below, with not one chance in three that any will escape alive? The "Victoria" supplied an answer. Not for a single moment does there seem to have been even a faltering word or a flurried deed.

Not even when the great ship reeled and quivered like a wounded thing beneath the crushing blow of 10,000 tons of metal hurled against it at the rate of eighteen miles an hour, did any of the crew or the officers lose their self-possession. Everything which had been laid down and provided for such an emergency was remembered and acted upon. Whether in trying to get out the collision mats or in the last desperate plunge shoreward, in which the half-sinking ship, with her forepart all under water, steamed towards the land-everything seems to have been done with the regularity and steadiness and cool courage that are the distinguishing features of the British navy. And in the last dread moment when the order wes given" Each for himself," which dissolved the organic whole of the disciplined ship's company into a mass of individuals each set free to seek his own safety in his own way, nothing seems to have been done unworthy the name and the fame of the British sailor. The papers, indeed, are full of stories of the self-forgetting devotion of these blue-jackets to each

other.

OBJECT LESSONS OF HEROISM.

All seem to have beta alike, from the admiral who sank with his ship to the chaplain who perished in saving others. The midshipman who refused to leave the admiral and went down by his side. The brave

fellow who freed the diver from his lead-laden sinkers, and lost his own life while so doing although he saved the diver's-and all the other incidents of heroic selflessness and a comradeship that is stronger than death-these things are a priceless addition to the heritage of our land. These men have not died for naught or in vain. They have died that we might live, as much as if they had fallen beneath the canopy of the battle smoke, amid the roar of the broadside. There, off the Tripoli roadstead, as much as at Trafalgar, did England help us; how can we help England? Such things are to nations as the bread of life. They remind us of the saving virtue of obedience and of discipline, and they inspire the breast of the people with an ideal of duty and of self-sacrifice which ennobles and glorifies the every-day life of the ordinary man. For they were not picked souls, the three hundred that perished off Tripoli, as were the three hundred of Thermopylæ. They were taken at random out of the rank and file and put into the crucible. By such experimental tests in the laboratory of life history is able to form its estimate of a race. So long as the chance samples of our common folk can die as did the men of the "Victoria," there is not much fear but that the empire will live.

ADMIRAL TRYON AN ENGLISHMAN TO THE CORE.

Ordinary English folk they were in the engine room and in the stoke-hole as well as upon the quarter-deck. For the admiral, whose name is on every lip, was a fair type of the naval officer who comes of a good old English stock, passes through the usual training of our service and arrives in due time at the summit of his profession. Sir George Tryon was intensely human. The instinct of self-preservation was strong in him, and from his youth he had ever a keen eye for every step that led aloft. He pushed his way from the midshipman's hammock to the admiral's cabin, nor did he ever forget himself along every step of that long road which led him from the trenches of Sebastopol to the command of the Mediterranean fleet. The story of his career is a fair sample of that of the successful naval officer. Born sixty-one years ago, Admiral Tryon kept unimpaired to his death that wonderful stock of native energy and supreme personal vitality which constitute the most obvious secret of his success in life. The second son of a Northampton country gentleman, he was born into an old Tory atmosphere which agreed with him. His father was Chairman of the Conservative Association of North Northampton, and one of the episodes in the son's varied career was a candidature in the Conservative interest for Spalding in 1887, which issued disastrously for his party. The father Tryon was all of the olden school; a man to whom poaching was as the sin against the Holy Ghost; who stood up for the Church and the Crown; a law and order man, with but scant sympathies with modern tendencies; a man, in short, who ruled in the squirearchy as his son and his brother, Admiral Robert Tryon-for Sir George is not the only admiral in the family-ruled on the quarter-deck.

HIS CAREER OF PROMOTION. To some extent the father's influence was modified by the more refined and cultured spirit of his mother, from whom he is said to have inherited many of his best qualities. George was a younger son, and as it was necessary he should do something for himself, he followed his uncle's example and entered the navy. He became a middy when sixteen, and six years later, when the Crimean War broke out, he found himself as mate in the Naval Brigade before Sebastopol. In the trenches he received his first and only wound, for the Crimean campaign was his sole experience of actual war. When Sebastopol was taken, Tryon was lieutenant with a couple of medals and the clasps of Inkermann and Sebastopol. For the next twelve years he fought his way steadily upward, serving a turn on the Royal yacht, and afterward gaining his first experience of an ironclad as commander of the "Warrior." For thirteen years therefore he had served in the old line-of-battle ships, and after three years on board the Warrior" he went back to the older ships, commanding (1864–6) a small gun vessel of four guns on the Mediterranean station, and afterward going as additional captain for transport service to the "Octavia" on the East India station.

It was in connection with this appointment that he found his first opportunity for distinguishing himself. The Abyssinian Expedition in 1868 necessitating the transport of an immense quantity of stores and material of war to Lord Napier's base on the coast, Captain Tryon was appointed as Director of Transport. The Admiralty could not have made a better choice. Captain Tryon, full of energy, indefatigable, sparing neither himself nor others, with the personal appearance of one born to command, and a determination that, whether he was born to it or not, he was going to do it, and that he would stand no nonsense, was the very man for the post. He made his mark, obtained his C.B., was specially mentioned in the dispatches and received the Abyssinian medal. Annesley Bay was his jumping-off place. From that moment he never looked behind him.

Captain Tryon obtained his first commission behind the scenes in 1871, when he became private secretary to Mr. Goschen, who was First Lord of the Admiralty. With Mr. Goschen he remained till Mr. Gladstone was turned out in 1874. Mr. Goschen has been fortunate in his private secretaries, for Mr. Milner was as remarkable in his way as Captain Tryon was in naval affairs. After being for three years the mouthpiece, factotum, and sometimes, perhaps, the wirepuller of Mr. Goschen, he returned to active service as Captain of the "Raleigh" in 1874.

HE WAS A DIPLOMAT AND COURTIER.

From 1874 onward, Captain Tryon was afloat, serving either in the detached squadron or in the Mediterranean. His first notable command was the "Monarch," which he joined in 1878. In this vessel in 1880-1 it was his good fortune to act more as a British plenipotentiary in Tunisian waters than as a

mere captain of a ship in the Mediterranean fleet. The French were then engaged in occupying Tunis, to compensate themselves for the occupation of Cyprus. Captain Tryon was told off to keep a look out on their doings. This he did with great adroitness and diplomatic address. He never offended the French, but they never got the better of him, and when, in 1881, he served as one of the Commissioners who had to inquire into the Sfax bombardment claims, he acquitted himself to universal satisfaction. In 1879 he became naval aide-de-camp to the Queen, a post which he delighted in, for, true to his hereditary tendencies, Tryon was ever a courtier, to whom decorations are realities worth thinking about, and royal favor as the sunshine from on high.

NOT AN ORATOR.

After he paid off the " Monarch" Captain Tryon once more returned to the penetralia of the Admiralty administration, and for three or four years acted as Permanent Secretary to the Board. It was during the latter end of that period that I first met him, during the agitation which the Pall Mall Gazette carried to a successful issue for the strengthening of the navy. He struck me at the time as a man of great natural force, with a very strongly-developed instinct of selfpreservation and a much clearer perception of the importance of the special work in which he was immediately engaged than of the bearing of that particular department upon the navy as a whole. For so able a man he seemed singularly inarticulate, although he may purposely have adopted that method of conversation in order to conceal his thought. That could hardly have been the case when he was discoursing upon the one topic on which he was at that time most interested-the necessity for increasing the number of stokers. He repeated himself over and over again, read passages from his report, harked back to it and fumbled around it until I confess I got rather wearied. He was quite right in what he said, no doubt-as right as that two and two make four; but an iterated and reiterated demonstration of the fact that two and two make four is apt to pall upon you. He was a man of ideas which manœuvred at short range round the center, but possibly enough this very concentration was one of the elements of his influence in the service. As with Mr. Gladstone, when once he had made an idea his own, it acquired an altogether new and almost transcendental importance by the mere fact of such adoption.

COMPARED WITH THE G. O. M.

Mr. Gladstone, it is often said in the navy, would have made a splendid admiral of the old school. Admiral Tryon was something of the kind of admiral that Mr. Gladstone would have been, minus Mr. Gladstone's marvelous capacity for lucid expression, a gift which is thrown into relief by his still more marvelous gift of concealing his meaning when it does not suit him to speak plainly. There was in the two men a great driving force, a powerful, all-pervading personality that was the great secret of their power. The

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THE "VICTORIA Admiral, like the Prime Minister, in his naval manoeuvres was bold, dexterous, subtle and rusé. The old parliamentary hand of St. Stephen's would have found his peer in the tall Admiral if they had been pitted against each other in some arena where each could do his best. Both had achieved so many successes by bold and dexterous manoeuvring, that both at length were their own undoing, and there are others besides Unionists may see a fatal analogy between the attempt to turn round in a space too narrow off the roadstead of Tripoli, and Mr. Gladstone's "steam tactics" in dealing with Home Rule.

IN AUSTRALIA AND PALL MALL.

After Tryon left the Admiralty, he was appointed to the command of the Australian station, over the heads of twenty senior rear-admirals. There was some growling that found expression in the columns of the London World, where "Atlas" maintained that his sudden lift was due to nepotism and jobbery at the Admiralty. As a matter of fact, the Admiralty wanted to see what could be done in the way of concerted naval action with the colonies, and they sent out their ex-Permanent Secretary to see what could be done. They chose wisely, and the action that was subsequently taken by the Australian colonies was largely due to the diplomacy, the personality, and the driving force of Admiral Tryon.

On his return from Australia in 1887 he received his K.C.B., and for the next three years he was regarded at Whitehall as a kind of champion admiral, whom they utilized by giving command of one or

other of the fleets in the naval manoeuvres for three successive years. In 1888, a year after he had tried to enter parliament and failed, he was appointed Admiral Superintendent of the Naval Reserves, and here he found an ample field for his exuberant energy. He was not a good worker, but he loved to wield the pen. He experienced a genuine delight in "making things hum," to quote an expressive American idiom. He drew up a report on the Naval Reserves which is still the chief authority upon the subject, he reorganized the system of coast signals, and generally did what a capable, pushing, hard working seaman ashore could do to improve the administration of our fleets.

His tall, commanding figure was very familiar during these years in Whitehall, Spring Gardens and Pall Mall. "A tall, big-built man," said an Australian interviewer, "is Admiral Tryon, with close-cut beard and moustache-a typical lord of the sea." A great smoker and a man who loved to hear himself talk, he was a personage and an authority who loomed almost as big in society as he did in person.

COMMANDER OF THE VICTORIA. HER FIRST MISHAP. In 1891 he became the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet, hoisting his flag on the "Victoria" in September, in succession to Admiral Hoskins, the present first Sea Lord. There he remained, never quitting his ship, not even when the "Camperdown" sent her to the bottom.

The story of the manner in which Admiral Tryon prepared and carried out the operations necessary for the rescue of the "Victoria" when she had run