Toll for the brave-- The brave that are no more: All sunk beneath the wave, Fast by their native shore. Eight hundred of the brave, Whose courage well was tried, Had made the vessel heel And laid her on her side; A land-breeze shook the shrouds, And she was overset; Down went the _Royal George_, With all her crew complete. Toll for the brave-- Brave Kempenfelt is gone, His last sea-fight is fought, His work of glory done. It was not in the battle, No tempest gave the shock, She sprang no fatal leak, She ran upon no rock; His sword was in the sheath, His fingers held the pen, When Kempenfelt went down With twice four hundred men. Weigh the vessel up, Once dreaded by our foes, And mingle with your cup The tears that England owes; Her timbers yet are sound, And she may float again, Full charg'd with England's thunder, And plough the distant main; But Kempenfelt is gone, His victories are o'er; And he and his eight hundred Must plough the wave no more. --_Cowper_. CHAPTER XVII THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783) The rights and wrongs of this Revolution are not our business here. But British sea-power is. So we should like to tell the whole story of the Navy in that unhappy time; because most books say little about it and do not say that little well. But, as we have no time for more than the merest glance, all we can do is to ask those who want to learn the truth in full to read _The Influence of Sea-Power on History_, by that expert American, Admiral Mahan. The Revolution was not a fight between British and Americans, as we and they are apt to think it now, but a British civil war that divided people in Britain as well as in America. In both countries there were two parties, the Government and Opposition, each against the other; the only difference, though a very great one, being that while the Opposition in America took up arms the Opposition in Britain did not. Both countries were then parts of the same British Empire; and so this war was really the link between the other two great civil wars that have divided the English-speaking peoples. Thus there were three civil wars in three successive centuries: the British Civil War in the seventeenth, between Roundhead and Cavalier in England; the British-American Civil War in the eighteenth, between the King's Party Government and the Opposition on both sides of the Atlantic; and the American Civil War in the nineteenth, between the North and South of the United States.