George Paine Rainsford James
(1801-1860).

George Paine Rainsford James was even more prolific than Ainsworth. He is said to have written more than one hundred novels, besides historical books and poetry. No wonder therefore that the name of James became a by-word for conventionality of opening and for diffuse weakness of style. More perhaps than Ainsworth he has suffered from time, because he remains more constantly on a dead level of mediocrity. James trusted, and in his own day trusted not in vain, to adventure; but unless there is some saving virtue of style, or of thought, or of character, each generation insists on making its own adventures. James has sunk under the operation of this law, and he is not likely to be revived.

Frederick Marryat
(1792-1848).

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.

Michael Scott
(1789-1835).

Michael Scott, one of the Blackwood group of writers, would be not unworthy to be bracketed with Marryat if a man could be judged by parts of his books without regard to the whole; but unfortunately Tom Cringle’s Log (1829-30) and The Cruise of the Midge (1836) are little more than scenes and incidents loosely strung together. Perhaps Scott was influenced by the genius loci; at any rate his books resemble the Noctes Ambrosianæ in so far as they are the outlet to every riotous fancy and every lawless freak of the writer’s humour.

Marryat had several imitators, the best of whom were Glascock and Chamier, the latter still fairly well known by name as the author of Ben Brace and The Arethusa. But though they had practical experience of sea life, like Marryat, Glascock and Chamier had not his literary faculty. At a later date, James Hannay, the essayist and critic, essayed the naval tale with more literary skill, but without the practical knowledge possessed by these men.

Samuel Warren
(1807-1877).