Now this might have come straight from another Dampier. There is no attempt to convince you of the force of the hurricane by laborious descriptions of what it looked like. It is shown to be awful by the effect it produces. The sentences go rapidly on. Their very simplicity helps to convey the impression of the suddenness and overwhelming fury of the storm. The effect would have been lost if the writer had stopped to talk. The style seems to me to be the perfection of prose, for a tale of adventure--the straightforward, almost colloquial report of one who has gone through it all, carried to its very best--made into literature without being obtrusively literary. As the style is, so are the stories. A natural tact seems to have told Marryat when he had gone far enough in search of the strange. His heroes lead lives that are possible. He might, if he had chosen, have rivalled Michael Scott’s wondrous pirates. Once, indeed, in “Percival Keene,” he actually did it, but, as a rule, his pirate is a conceivable good-for-nothing rather cowardly blackguard, such as came in the natural course of things to swing at Kingston or at Execution Dock. Even Cain himself, “The Pirate,” is within the bounds of probability as compared with the wondrous Spanish Americans, or astounding Scotch gentlemen of superhuman wickedness, who flourish in “Tom Cringle’s Log,” and the “Cruise of the _Midge_.” Neither do incidents of the wilder and more horrific kind appear in Marryat’s books. There is nothing in him, for instance, like that scene of the “_Midge_ in the Hornets’ nest,” which may, by the way, be commended to the attention of critics who think that blood and horror have been recently imported into romance by a generation which is supposed to have been corrupted by the French taste of the decadence. The adventures of Marryat’s heroes might possibly and even probably have befallen an officer of his time. Of construction, except such as was imposed by an instinctive desire to make the incidents follow one another in some sort of natural sequence, there is little or no sign. When, as in “Peter Simple,” he tries to fit one on to his story, it is no addition to the merits of the book. Who cares a straw for Peter’s wicked uncle, for the changing of the children, or for the unravelling of the very transparent mystery? It is too obvious that Marryat took these things at random from the common fund of the Minerva Press. What he took from nobody was his fun.