Such, in rough outline, is that great work of his, which perhaps might justly represent us to the world, with the Plays of Shakespeare, in the two aspects of which we are most proud, our seamanship and our poetry, were two books only to be taken from our literature. Shakespeare and Hakluyt, who by a singular coincidence both died in the same year, make together an epitome of the English people. In a large number of cases they share the fate of classics, especially classics on the great scale, and are ‘taken as read.’ But no matter: their thought and their passion, different though they are in degree, have permeated the very marrow of our minds, we absorb them unconsciously simply because we are English. The most unlettered seaman is a ‘pilgrim’ of Hakluyt’s and an embodiment of his hopes; the most casual or most glorious Englishman is a type of Shakespeare’s, and to be found in that ‘universal gallery’ of his plays. In Hakluyt we enjoy the English combination of the poetic and the practical, and delight in his shrewdness and his pure enthusiasm. He set out to prove, in a partially discovered world, that in the splendid saying of an earlier Englishman, Robert Thorne, ‘There is no land unhabitable, nor sea innavigable.’ That might be the motto of his book; while as to him and all the seamen he fathered and gloried in we may take the delightful words of Fuller and see them as ‘bound for no other harbour but the Port of Honour, though touching at the Port of Profit in passage thereunto.’ E. HALLAM MOORHOUSE. _THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: FIGHTING STRENGTH._ BY BOYD CABLE. The fighting strength of the three batteries of a Brigade of Field Artillery, at the time of the First Expeditionaries, totalled 18 guns, 18 officers, and about 650 non-commissioned officers and men. You might remember those figures, or when you have finished the reading of this tale just refer back to them.