In a volume like this, 'the dangers of the seas' come before the reader in such rapid succession, that he has scarcely time to think of the many other awful perils and sufferings, besides those of wind and storm, which put the mariner's fortitude to the test. The narratives in pages 2, 3, 9, 36, 69, 70, 113, 115, present to view the horrors of a ship on fire. In pages 12, 169, 171, 196, 226, 242, we learn something of the terrible consequences of being exposed to fogs and mist, ice and snow. In page 27, we have a vivid picture of a combination of these terrors; and in pages 217, 268, the most appalling of all the dangers a sailor has to encounter is brought in view. We will hope that the rigours and perils of the blockade system, which occasioned so fearful a loss of life at different periods of the late war, but especially in the disastrous year 1811, are at end for ever. From page 154 to 159, and from 168 to 186, the accounts of the loss of life in the Baltic and North Seas alone occur in fearful succession; and the magnanimity with which hundreds, nay, thousands of our bravest officers and men met death on that most perilous of all services, has rendered the names of British blockading ships memorable in the annals of hardship, hardihood, and suffering. Many invaluable lives perished from the inclemency of the weather; men were frozen to death at their posts. It is recorded of one devoted officer, Lieutenant Topping, that rushing on deck in anxiety for his ship, without giving himself time to put on his clothes, 'in fifteen minutes he fell upon the deck a corpse, stricken by the piercing blast and driving snow,' (p. 169.) In page 174, we read of the bodies of the dead, victims to the cold and tempest, piled up by the survivors in rows one above another, on the deck of the St. George, to serve as a shelter against the violence of the waves and weather. 'In the fourth row lay the bodies of the Admiral and his friend Captain Guion;' and out of a crew of 750, seven only were saved. The Defence, the consort of the St. George, was cast away in the same storm: out of her complement of 600, six was the small remnant of survivors. This ship might probably have escaped, but her gallant captain (Atkins) said, 'I will never desert my admiral in the hour of danger and distress,' (p. 175.) An instance of obedience and discipline, worthy of particular mention, occurred before the St. George went down. A few men asked leave to attempt to reach the shore in the yawl. Permission was at first granted, but afterwards withdrawn, and the men returned to their posts without a murmur. 'As if Providence had rewarded their implicit obedience and reliance upon their officers,' says the narrative (p. 173), 'two of these men were of the few (seven) that were saved.'