xiv MEMOIR 



him, like his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle William, 

 it was perhaps because he never married at all. 



The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the 

 General Post Office, followed in all material points the example 

 of Stephen, married 'not very creditably,' and spent all the 

 money he could lay his hands on. He died without issue ; as 

 did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak intellect and 

 feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief career 

 as one of Mrs. Buckner's satellites will fall to be considered 

 later on. So soon, then, as the Minotaur had struck upon the 

 Dogger Bank, Stowting and the line of the Jenkin family fell 

 on the shoulders of the third brother, Charles. 



Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks ; facility 

 (to judge by these imprudent marriages) being at once their 

 quality and their defect ; but in the case of Charles, a man of 

 exceptional beauty and sweetness both of face and disposition, 

 the family fault had quite grown to be a virtue, and we find him 

 in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his relatives. Born 

 in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt both salt 

 water and powder. The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as 

 I can make out, to the land service. Stephen's son had been a 

 soldier ; William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the 

 unhappy Braddock's in America, where, by the way, he owned 

 and afterwards sold an estate on the James River, called after 

 the parental seat; of which I should like well to hear if it still 

 bears the name. It was probably by the influence of Captain 

 Buckner, already connected with the family by his first marriage, 

 that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction of the 

 navy ; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the Prothee, 64, that 

 the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days of Rodney's 

 war, when the Prothee, we read, captured two large privateers 

 to windward of Barbadoes, and was ' materially and distin- 

 guishedly engaged ' in both the actions with De Grasse. While 

 at sea, Charles kept a journal, and made strange archaic pilot- 

 book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of which survive 

 for the amusement of posterity. He did a good deal of surveying, 

 so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of 



