Frederick Marryat was a man of altogether higher merit than these two. Indeed there are several points, of vital moment for permanence of fame, wherein he surpasses Disraeli and Lytton as well. He was by far the most natural and genuine of the whole group. He was also, _qua_ novelist, the most original. There is no affectation, no pretentiousness, in Marryat. Through his breezy style there blows the freshness of an Atlantic gale, rude and boisterous, but invigorating. He is moreover the best painter of the naval life of that day, and the fact that it has passed away for ever, by closing the subject to future writers, or condemning them to write at second-hand, gives to his works a special promise of permanence. Marryat's literary career reaches from _Frank Mildmay_ (1829) to the posthumous _Valerie_ (1849). His stories embody many incidents of his own life, and his characters are often reproductions of actual men. Thus, the Captain Savage of Peter Simple is partly a picture of Marryat's first commander, the great Cochrane, to whose adventurous spirit he owed an experience richer, though crowded within a few years, than a lifetime of the 'weak piping time of peace.' This was his literary stock-in-trade. His rattling adventure, his energetic description, his fun and liveliness, are the charm of his best books--_Peter Simple_, _Jacob Faithful_, _Midshipman Easy_, _Japhet in Search of a Father_. His plots are rough but sufficient; his characters show little penetration; but the habit of drawing from the life prevented him from going far wrong. From the nature of his subjects and from his mode of treatment Marryat invites comparison with his predecessors, Smollett and Fenimore Cooper, as well as with his contemporary, Michael Scott, who, next to Marryat himself, is the best of the naval story-tellers of that time. Marryat is by no means the equal of Smollett in richness of humour. His is rather the humour of boisterous spirits than that intellectual quality which gives so fine a flavour to books. On the other hand, Marryat is much more humane than Smollett. The life depicted by both is rough to the last degree. In Smollett, the roughness frequently passes over into brutality; while Marryat, though he depicts brutality, never seems to share it. As against the American, Cooper, Marryat has the advantage, in his sea stories, of greater familiarity with the life he paints; Cooper's strength is elsewhere, and there he reaches higher than Marryat's highest point. [Sidenote: Michael Scott (1789-1835).]