The same conveyance that brought Julia's letters also brought instructions to the other partners of the house to fit out two vessels for the Pacific, one of which was to be entrusted to the command of Captain Allerton; but Mr. Effingham omitted to designate which of the two was to be honored by being for some months the floating home of his fair daughter; either intending it should be left to her option, or taking it for granted that his partner, well aware of the intimacy of Allerton's standing in her father's family, would of course place Julia on board the ship commanded by George. But that partner was a crafty old fox, who had long since seen the growing affection of the two young people, and, with all that eagerness to destroy happiness, that they are past enjoying, that characterizes the majority of old people, decided that Miss Julia should, for a time, entrust her person and fortunes to the fatherly care of Captain Burton, a sedate old Cornish man of sixty years of age, who had no more idea of love than he had of the Chaldee language.
Should a man full of talk be justified? O that ye would altogether hold your peace; and it should be your wisdom.
Voyages across the Atlantic are now performed every day by old and young women and children, and described by them so much more elegantly and scientifically, and with so much more correct knowledge of the technicalities necessary for such descriptions, than it is possible that seafaring men can ever attain, that if one of the latter, in a moment of mental hallucination, was to undertake to convey an idea of the element that has been his home for years, he would be hissed off the stage as another Munchausen. For this reason nautical men, who have laid aside the marlinspike and taken up the pen, very prudently avoid that portion of the literary arena, leaving Daddy Neptune's dominions to be explored and described by landsmen.
It is in obedience to public opinion in this respect, I suppose, that our Secretaries of the Navy are almost uniformly chosen from the "mass of the people," at the greatest possible distance from high-water mark; men who have never seen a piece of water that they could not jump across, or a ship, except in the newspaper, till they came to Washington. "Let the sea make a noise, and the fulness thereof; let the floods clap their hands" for joy, that the Cooks and the Falconers, the Ansons and the Byrons, of olden time, are at length banished from the department of nautical literature, and no _oceanic_ description will be listened to unless said or sung by a _ci-devant_ midshipman or a half-boy, half-woman poet, who lies in his berth, and sees, through the four-inch-plank deadlight of a packet, the full moon rising in the west. James Fenimore Cooper, Esq.--I give the man his entire name and title, as he seems to insist upon it upon all occasions--the "American Walter Scott," is undisputably at the very head of his _trade_ at the present day for nautical descriptions; his terrestrial admirers have pronounced him "a practical seaman;" and, of course, the only man in these United States that can give any, even an approximate idea of the sea, and "those that go down in ships." I have at my pen's end six or eight very desperate "cases" of his knowledge of "practical seamanship" and maritime affairs, which may be found in the "Red Rover" and "Water Witch" _passim_; but those animals, vulgarly called critics, but more politely and properly at present, reviewers, whom the New York Mirror defines to be "great dogs, that go about unchained and growl at every thing they do not comprehend," these dogs have dragged the lion's hide partly off, and ascertained, what every man, to whom the Almighty has vouchsafed an ordinary share of common sense, had all along suspected, that it covered an ass. James Fenimore Cooper, Esquire's "Letter to his Countrymen" was an explosion of folly and absurdity that has blown his name up so high, that there is little or no chance of its coming down again "this king's reign." Whether he was or was not hired to write it to support the present administration, as some folks suspect, is not my affair. I will, therefore, resume the thread of my discourse, which was only "belayed" for a few minutes, to indulge in the rare pleasure of grumbling a little at seeing