[25] Be not indignant, ye broader waves of Thames and Isis! In the number of contending barks, and the excitement of the spectators of the strife, Cam may, with all due modesty, boast herself unequalled. To the swiftness of her champion galleys ye have yourselves often borne witness. [26] The most fashionable promenade for the "spectantes" and "spectandi" of Cambridge. [27] "Narratur et prisci Catonis Sæpe mero caluisse virtus."--HORACE, _Odes_. [28] VIRGIL, _Æneid_, i. 415. JACK MOONLIGHT. Some time ago, on the way from Glasgow to Liverpool, amongst the confusion and bustle in the railway terminus at Greenock, I was interested by seeing what struck me more by contrast with the rest of the scene, but, from old associations, would have drawn my attention at any time. Passengers, porters, and trucks were meeting from both directions; ladies and gentlemen anxious about their bandboxes and portmanteaus; one engine puffing off its steam, and another screaming as it departed. Through the midst of all, a group of six seamen, from a third-class carriage, were lugging along their bags and hammocks, dingy and odorous with genuine tar in all its modifications. Five of the party, of different heights, ages, and sizes, were as dark-brown mahogany-colour, in face, throat, and hands, as some long sea-voyage had made them, evidently through latitudes where the wind blows the sun, if the sun doesn't burn the wind. One was a fine, stout, middle-aged man, with immense whiskers and a cap of Manilla grass, a large blue jacket, with a gorgeous India handkerchief stuffed in its capacious outside pocket, and brown trousers, with boots, whom I at once set down for the boatswain of some good East-Indiaman. The sixth was a woolly-pated negro lad, about nineteen or twenty, dressed in sailor's clothes with the rest, but with his characteristically shapeless feet cramped up in a pair of Wellingtons, in which he stumped along, while his companions had the usual easy roll of their calling. The fellow was black as a coal, thick-lipped and flat-nosed; but if, like most negroes, he had only kept grinning, it would not have seemed so ridiculous as the gravity of his whole air. Some young ladies standing near, with parasols spread to save their fair complexions from the sun, said to each other, "Oh, do look at the foreign sailors!" I knew, however, without requiring to hear a single word from them, that they were nothing else but the regular true-blue English tars; such, indeed, as you seldom find belonging to even the sister kingdoms. A Scotchman or an Irishman may make a good sailor, and, for the theory of the thing, why, they are probably "six and half-a-dozen;" but, somehow, there appears to be in the English sea-dog a peculiar capacity of developing the appropriate ideal character--that frank, bluff, hearty _abandon_, and mixture of practical skill with worldly simplicity, which mark the oceanic man.