Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 | Page 9

for David to end as Rembrandt began.'

ADMIRAL BLAKE.[1]
A good biography is ever welcome; and if it be the biography of a good
and a great man, the cordiality of the bienvenu is doubled. Mr Prescott
remarks,[2] that there is no kind of writing, having truth and instruction
for its main object, which, on the whole, is so interesting and popular as
biography: its superiority, in this point of view, to history, consisting in
the fact, that the latter has to deal with masses--with nations, which,
like corporate societies, seem to have no soul, and whose chequered
vicissitudes may be contemplated rather with curiosity for the lessons
they convey, than with personal sympathy. Among contemporary
biographers, Mr Hepworth Dixon has already established for himself a
name of some distinction by his popular lives of William Penn and
John Howard; nor will his credit suffer a decline in the instance of the
memoir now before us--that of the gallant and single-minded patriot,
Robert Blake. Of this fine old English worthy, republican as he was,
the Tory Hume freely affirms, that never man, so zealous for a faction,
was so much respected and even esteemed by his opponents.
'Disinterested, generous, liberal; ambitious only of true glory, dreadful
only to his avowed enemies; he forms one of the most perfect
characters of the age, and the least stained with those errors and vices
which were then so predominant.'[3] Yet hitherto the records of this
remarkable man have been scanty in matter, and scattered in form--the

most notable being Dr Johnson's sketch in the Gentleman's Magazine,
and another in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Mr Dixon has consulted
several scarce works, of genuine though obsolete authority, and a large
mass of original documents and family papers, in preparing the present
able and attractive memoir; not omitting a careful examination of the
squibs, satires, and broadsides of that time, in his endeavour to trace, in
forgotten nooks and corners, the anecdotes and details requisite, as he
says, to complete a character thus far chiefly known by a few heroic
outlines. We propose taking a brief survey of his life-history of the
great admiral and general at sea--the 'Puritan Sea-King,' as Mr Dixon
more characteristically than accurately calls his hero. A sea-king he
was, every inch of him; but to dub him Puritan, is like giving up to
party what was meant for British mankind. To many, the term suggests
primarily a habit of speaking through the nose; and Blake had
thundered commands through too many a piping gale and battle blast
for that.
Robert Blake was born at Bridgewater, in August 1599. His father,
Humphrey Blake, was a merchant trading with Spain--a man whose
temper seems to have been too sanguine and adventurous for the
ordinary action of trade, finally involving him in difficulties which
clouded his latter days, and left his family in straitened circumstances:
his name, however, was held in general respect; and we find that he
lived in one of the best houses in Bridgewater, and twice filled the chair
of its chief magistrate. The perils to which mercantile enterprise was
then liable--the chance escapes and valorous deeds which the
successful adventurer had to tell his friends and children on the dark
winter nights--doubtless formed a part of the food on which the
imagination of young Blake, 'silent and thoughtful from his childhood,'
was fed in the 'old house at home.' At the Bridgewater grammar-school,
Robert received his early education, making tolerable acquaintance
with Latin and Greek, and acquiring a strong bias towards a literary life.
This penchant was confirmed by his subsequent career at Oxford,
where he matriculated at sixteen, and where he strove hard but
fruitlessly for scholarships and fellowships at different colleges. His
failure to obtain a Merton fellowship has been attributed to a crotchet
of the warden's, Sir Henry Savile, in favour of tall men: 'The young

Somersetshire student, thick-set, fair complexioned, and only five feet
six, fell below his standard of manly beauty;' and thus the Cavalier
warden, in denying this aspirant the means of cultivating literature on a
little university oatmeal, was turning back on the world one who was
fated to become a republican power of the age. This shining light,
instead of comfortably and obscurely merging in a petty constellation
of Alma Mater, was to become a bright particular star, and dwell apart.
The avowed liberalism of Robert may, however, have done more in
reality to shock Sir Henry, than his inability to add a cubit to his stature.
It is pleasant to know, that the 'admiral and general at sea' never
outgrew a tenderness for literature--his first-love, despite the rebuff of
his advances. Even in the busiest turmoil of a life teeming with
accidents by flood and field, he made it a point of pride