The last were thoroughly impregnated with the briny element on which they passed their lives. They boasted themselves a race apart. “Land-lubber” was for them a term conveying the utmost amount of derision and contempt. To be an “old salt” was the ideal perfection at which alone it was worth while for humanity to aim. The seaman, exulting in his profession, was never more a seaman than when rolling about on shore, swearing strange oaths, using nautical phrases, consuming vast quantities of beer and tobacco, above all, flinging his money here and there with a profuse and injudicious liberality especially distinctive of his kind. The popularity of such characters amongst the lower classes may be readily imagined; for, with the uneducated and unreflecting, a reckless bearing very generally passes for courage; a tendency to dissipation for manliness; and a boastful expenditure for true generosity of heart. Perhaps, to the erroneous impressions thus disseminated amongst the young, should be attributed the inclination shown towards a service of which the duties entailed continual danger, excessive hardship, and daily privation. Certainly at a period when the worst provision was made, both physical and moral, for the welfare of men before the mast, there never seems to have been found a difficulty in keeping up the full complement of the British navy. They were, indeed, a race apart, not only in their manners, their habits, their quaint expressions, their simple modes of thought, but in their superstitions and even their religious belief. They cultivated a rough, honest kind of piety, well illustrated in later years by Dibdin, himself a landsman, when he sang of “The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft To take care of the life of poor Jack.” But it was overloaded and interspersed with a thousand strange fancies not more incongruous than unreasonable and far-fetched.