What stories I could tell, had I the time and space, of heroic deeds “unwritten and unsung” performed by the men of the Fleet, not only in the past, but now!--now, in these actual present days, when great London, plunged to the neck in a flood of gold, poured in for the help, healing, and comfort of our fighting men on land and sea, is striving, like a giant caught in a net, to disentangle its sacred duties from its selfish pleasures,--trying to realise in its vague way that War is really War! Of “Tommy” one hears much; but of “Jack Tar” less,--though they are close comrades in the one spirit of devotion to duty, and each has his own burden of difficulties to bear,--his own sphere of danger to surmount and to master. The story of brave Jack Cornwell thrilled every heart,--putting well into the shade the similar exploit of “Casabianca,” of whom, when we were children, we all learned, in the verse of Felicia Hemans:-- “The boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but him had fled; The flame that lit the battle’s wreck Shone round him o’er the dead.” and “The noblest thing that perished there Was that young, faithful heart.” Only there is no poet among us worthy of the name to “sing the memory” of Jack Cornwell, thanks to the swarm of atheists, pessimists, decadents, and anti-idealists who have been encouraged to darken and disgrace the literary annals of Great Britain. “Casabianca” was a boy about thirteen years of age, son to the Admiral of the _Orient_, who remained at his post in the Battle of the Nile after the ship had taken fire and all the guns had been abandoned, and perished in the explosion of the vessel when the flames had reached the powder. All who have read the enthralling pages of our sea-history will remember that the _Orient_ was the French Admiral’s ship, carrying a hundred and twenty guns, and that he himself died on her quarter-deck, his little son remaining at the post where his father had placed him, all unconscious of his father’s end. “Soon after nine o’clock,” says the historian, “the _Orient_ appeared in flames, which spread with astonishing rapidity, and by their prodigious light the situation of the hostile fleets could be seen at a distance of fifteen miles. The _Orient’s_ crew, however, continued to fire from her lower-deck to the very last, and at about ten o’clock she blew up with an explosion which was felt by every vessel to the bottom of its keel. To this succeeded a silence not less awful,--the sanguinary conflict ceased on both sides,--and the first sound that broke that portentous stillness was the splash of shattered masts and yards falling into the sea.” So “Casabianca” perished gallantly--but not more gallantly than Jack Cornwell. Both boys, the one French, the other English, were made of the same heroic stuff that gives worth and honour to the nations that breed it.