His name was Frederick Marryat,[89] the son of a well-to-do London gentleman, who had served the little Borough of Sandwich as member of Parliament (and was also author of some verses and political tractates), but who did not wean his boy from an inborn love of the sea. To gratify this love the boy had sundry adventurous escapades; but when arrived at the mature age of fourteen, he entered as midshipman in the Royal Navy--his first service, and a very active one, being with that brave and belligerent Lord Cochrane, who later won renown on the west coast of South America. Adventures of most hazardous and romantic qualities were not wanting under such an officer, all of which were stored in the retentive memory of the enthusiastic and observant midshipman, and thereafter, for years succeeding, were strewn with a free hand over his tales of the sea. These break a good many of the rules of rhetoric--and so do sailors; they have to do with the breakage of nearly all the commandments--and so do sailors. But they are breezy; they are always pushing forward; spars and sails are all ship-shape; and so are the sailors’ oaths, and the rattle of the chain-cables, and the slatting of the gaskets, and the smell of the stews from the cook’s galley. There is also a liberal and _quasi_ democratic coloring of the links and interludes of his novels. The trials of _Peter Simple_ grow largely out of the cruel action of the British laws of primogeniture; nor does the jolly midshipman--grandson, or nephew--forego his satiric raps at my lord “Privilege.” Yet Marryat shows no special admiration for such evolutions of the democratic problem as he encounters in America.[90] Upon the whole, one finds no large or fine literary quality in his books; but the _fun_ in them is positive, and catching--as our aunts and uncles used to find it; but it is the fun of the tap-room, and of the for’castle, rather than of the salon, or the library. For all this, scores and scores of excellent old people were shaking their sides--in the early part of this century--over the pages of Captain Marryat--in the days when other readers with sighs were bemoaning the loss of the “Great Magician’s” power in the dreary story of _Count Robert of Paris_, or kindling into a new worship as they followed Ainsworth’s[91] vivid narrative of Dick Turpin’s daring gallop from London to York. A nearer name to us, and one perhaps more familiar, is that of G. P. R. James,[92] an excellent, industrious man, who drove his trade of novel-making--as our engineers drive wells--with steam, and pistons, and borings, and everlasting clatter.