There was, however, one class of ship which had a fair chance of active service. The frigates were never, even to the end, reduced to mere patrolling. It was to them indeed that fell all the brilliant fighting in the last ten years or so of the war. The French never altogether ceased to send forth cruisers which had necessarily to be pursued and captured. Moreover, there was work to be done upon the enemy’s coasts, convoys to be taken, forts to be destroyed, privateers to be cut out. After 1808 we were in alliance with the Spaniards, and there was then no want of chances for enterprising officers to distinguish themselves against the French invaders on the coasts, particularly in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, including the Adriatic, and the East Indies, were the great theatres of the war until the Americans struck in.
It was a material addition to his good fortune in being appointed to such a ship, and on such service, that he should have begun under the captain who then commanded the _Impérieuse_. The novelist who was to give the most living of all pictures of the navy at its greatest time could not possibly have met with a better chief. Lord Cochrane, who is better known as the Earl of Dundonald, was, next to Nelson (the master of them all), that one of the naval officers of the Great War who was most distinctly a man of genius. There were others who were brave, able, honourable gentlemen. In pure seamanship many may have been his equals. In a service which included such men as Blackwood, Hallowell, Willoughby, the Captain Hamilton who cut out the _Hermione_, Broke of the _Shannon_, and a hundred other valiant gentlemen, even Dundonald could not hope for a pre-eminence in valour. It may even be allowed that he never, while fighting for his own country, was able to achieve anything so complete, so distinctly what Cortes called a “muy hermosa cosa,” a very pretty piece of fighting with a squadron, as Sir William Hoste’s little gem of a victory over the French frigates off Lissa. He was not allowed the chance to handle a detachment of ships in independent command. But there was in Dundonald the indefinable something--“those deliveries of a man’s self which have no name,” that combination of passion and faculty--which makes the man of genius. Whatever he did was done with a burning fire of energy. The fire was not always pure. There was a self-assertion about the man--never base, but always aggressive, a pragmatical Scotch fierceness, a love of hate and scorn, a total inability to keep measure, which can be seen on every page of his Autobiography, and explain why it was that he was always, in our service or out of it, a free lance. He was of the race of Peterborough not of Marlborough. To the highest rank he did not belong, but he was divided in kind from the brave, able, disciplined, but shadowy men, who do the regular drilled work of the world. He was a magnificent, rugged individuality. Even in books he is real as only such men as Nelson and Wellington are real. On those who knew him his influence, even if it only produced repulsion, must have been profound. One so open to impressions, and so able to retain them as Marryat, must have been another man all his life for having known and admired Dundonald. It must be remembered, too, that Marryat saw Dundonald at his best--on the deck of his frigate, and not at the Admiralty or the House of Commons, where he was apt to make himself intolerable by his wrong-headed violence in right, and his inability to see that for the work of the reformer, as for all work, there is a proper time, and a fitting manner which must not be mistaken, under penalty of failure.