At the time the event made a widespread impression throughout Europe. It caused great enthusiasm, as we are told, in the camps of the allied armies fighting the French beyond the Rhine, and was honoured by a cannon salute. “We were entertained,” wrote a British officer in the army which had just fought at Minden, “with a _feu de joie_ within hearing of the French camp, in honour of Admiral Boscawen’s success against the Toulon squadron.” The little difficulty with Portugal that ensued was settled amicably. The elder Pitt, then Prime Minister, had his own way of dealing with matters that would upset the feebler nerved politicians of our modern House of Commons. The Opposition in the House tried, of course, to make party capital over Boscawen’s breach of Portuguese neutrality. “Very true,” was all the answer Pitt deigned to make, “but the enemy’s ships were burned.” He sent Lord Kinnoull to Lisbon with a polite expression of regret at the unavoidable necessity of the case, and the incident was not heard of again. For many years after her capture by Boscawen the _Téméraire_ was reckoned one of the finest seventy-fours in King George’s service, and among the “crack” ships of the British Navy. She served England both in European waters and across the Atlantic, with all the most notable admirals of the time—with Hawke and Boscawen himself; in the Channel Fleet blockading Brest; and under Keppel, Rodney, and Pocock in the West Indies. After being for nearly twenty years in commission, the old war-prize in her closing days—at the beginning of the war with France and Spain, when the two nations combined against England to assist the rebel American colonists—was converted into a floating-battery hulk for harbour defence, on which duty our first _Téméraire_ ended her career. In June, 1784, she was sold out of the service for breaking up. That is the story of our first _Téméraire_, the immediate predecessor of the famous “Fighting” _Téméraire_ of Trafalgar fame, which formed the subject of Turner’s masterpiece. One battleship of our ironclad fleet has borne the name. That was the _Téméraire_ which was with Sir Geoffrey Hornby when he passed the Dardanelles in 1878. She took part also at the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, and still exists, converted for use as a floating workshop at Devonport, under the unrecognizable label of _Indus II_. Our new “improved _Dreadnought_” _Téméraire_ of 1907 is the fourth bearer of the name under the British flag. V HAWKE’S FINEST PRIZE:—HOW THE _FORMIDABLE_ CHANGED HER FLAG The guns that should have conquered us they rusted on the shore, The men that would have mastered us they drummed and marched no more, For England was England, and a mighty brood she bore— When Hawke came swooping from the West!