64 ST. Jx\GO. 
for carrying on a contraband trade with the natives of this 
part of South America, whom the mother country is not only 
either unable or unwiUing to supply but, like the dog in the 
manger, endeavours to prevent all other nations from doing 
it. The Dunkirk ships were chiefly manned with English 
seamen, and Avere strongly suspected to be fitted out on 
English capitals. One of them was the old Resolution of 
Captain Cooke, now transformed to a smuggling whaler under 
the French name of La Liberie ; and, what was still worse, 
bearing the French republican flag. I am not ashamed to 
confess that my feelings Avere considerably hurt in witnessing 
this degradation of an object so intimately connected with 
that great man. Such a feeling, though excited by an inani- 
mate object, is not, I trust, either uncommon or unnatural. 
" There is not," says Pope, when describing his sensations on 
revisiting the place of his birth, " an old post by the road- 
" side which does not awaken the recollection of some pleas- 
" ing scene in my childish days ; and it gives me pain to see 
" even one of these old remembrancers destroyed." Few, I 
believe, will envy that man's feelings, who can see without 
emotion the house in which he was born, and in which he 
spent his happiest years, either wholly demolished or degraded 
to some unworthy purpose. The Resolution was the house .of 
our immortal Cooke and, out of respect to his memory, I 
would have laid her up in a dock, till she had Avasted away 
plank by plank. It was thus that Queen Elizabeth shewed 
her veneration for the object that carried her favourite Drake 
round the world. His ship Avas preserved Avith great care, for 
many years, in the dock-yard of Deptford ; and Avhen time 
had gradually reduced her to such a state of decay that she 
