But his heart was on salt water; he was never so much at home as in a ship foundering or splitting into the clouds. We are told that he never forgave the Admiralty for striking him off the list of English naval captains: which is no doubt why in his old age he nursed a grudge against his country. Ours, I am sure, was the loss; and many have thought so since. He was a mechanician, a master of stratagems; and would say, that brains will beat Grim Death if we have enough of them. He was a standing example of the lessons of his own MAXIMS FOR MEN, a very curious book, that fetches a rare price now wherever a copy is put up for auction. I shudder at them as if they were muzzles of firearms pointed at me; but they were not addressed to my sex; and still they give me an interest in the writer who would declare, that ‘he had never failed in an undertaking without stripping bare to expose to himself where he had been wanting in Intention and Determination.’ There you may see a truly terrible man. So the emperor being immensely taken with Kirby’s method of preserving discipline on board ship, because (as we say to the madman, ‘Your strait-waistcoat is my easy-chair’) monarchs have a great love of discipline, he begged Countess Fanny’s permission that he might invite Captain Kirby to his table; and Countess Fanny (she had the name from the ballad ‘I am the star of Prince and Czar, My light is shed on many, But I wait here till my bold Buccaneer Makes prize of Countess Fanny’:-- for the popular imagination was extraordinarily roused by the elopement, and there were songs and ballads out of number), Countess Fanny despatched her husband to Captain Kirby again, meaning no harm, though the poor man is laughed at in the songs for going twice upon his mission. None of the mighty people repented of having the Old Buccaneer--for that night, at all events. He sat in the midst of them, you may believe, like the lord of that table, with his great white beard and hair--not a lock of it shed--and his bronze lion-face, and a resolute but a merry eye that he had. He was no deep drinker of wine, but when he did drink, and the wine champagne, he drank to show his disdain of its powers; and the emperor wishing for a narrative of some of his exploits, particularly the blowing up of his ship, Kirby paid his Majesty the compliment of giving it him as baldly as an official report to the Admiralty. So disengaged and calm was he, with his bottles of champagne in him, where another would have been sparkling and laying on the colours, that he was then and there offered Admiral’s rank in the Imperial navy; and the Old Buccaneer, like a courtier of our best days, bows to Countess Fanny, and asks her, if he is a free man to go: and, No, says she, we cannot spare you! And there was a pretty wrangle between Countess Fanny and the emperor, each pulling at the Old Buccaneer to have possession of him.