So sang the Yankee ballad-maker when filled with the haughty spirit that precedes a fall. Surely, if ever a young nation had reason for exultation and even for vainglorious songs young America had. During eight months her tiny navy had not only maintained itself upon the high seas where the enemy out-numbered it a hundred to one, but, as said, it had won more victories in that time than all Europe had been able to do in twenty years. Not only had the Americans showed the sturdy and persistent courage of the ancestral stock; they had shown the ingenuity of invention, the power of adaptation under unusual circumstances, and the general progressiveness which the spirit of that stock always develops when freed from Tory--that is to say, unreasonably conservative--restraints. To the natural aptness for the sea which they had in common with their cousins over the water, they had added such characteristics as naturally grow out of self-government. Unfortunately, however, along with much good from the ancestral stock, they had also inherited not a little of the tendency to arrogant self-esteem. As the unbroken series of victories over European navies had made the British sailors feel themselves invincible, so the practically unbroken, if short, series of victories of the Americans over the British tars in the early months of the War of 1812, brought them to a state of mind where they trusted in something else than the unwearied vigilance and training that had made the crews of Hull, Decatur, Bainbridge, Jones, and Lawrence, the wonder--literally the wonder--of the whole world. Thereafter, defeat impended whenever an American ship might fall in with a British ship whose commander had not fallen into the prevailing slovenly habits of his navy. [Illustration: James Lawrence. _From an engraving by Edwin of the portrait of Stuart._] As it happened, Lawrence, who had been the last to earn the applause of his countrymen, was to be the victim of the growing vanity of his navy. In the frigate _Chesapeake_ he sailed out of Boston to meet the _Shannon_. As the people of Carrickfergus in the north of Ireland went out on an excursion fleet to see Captain Burden of the British ship _Drake_ thrash the life out of John Paul Jones in the American ship _Ranger_, so the people of Boston flocked to the sea in all sorts of craft and climbed to heights overlooking the water that they might see Lawrence bring in the bold Captain Broke, who was cruising to and fro, anxious for a combat. That they returned humiliated was due to the fact that Lawrence went into the battle in the spirit of Dacres and Carden, while Broke went into it in the spirit of Hull and Decatur.