“The Spectator,” September 20, 1913

A British Aeschylus, were such a person conceivable, might very fitly tell his countrymen, in the words addressed to Prometheus some twenty-three centuries ago, that they would find no friend more staunch than Oceanus:

In truth, the whole national life of England is summed up in the fine lines of Swinburne:

The natural instincts of a maritime nation are brought out in strong relief throughout the whole of English literature, from its very birth down to the present day. The author of “The Lay of Beowulf,” whoever he may have been, rivalled Homer in the awe-stricken epithets he applied to the “immense stream of ocean murmuring with foam” (Il. xviii. 402). “Then,” he wrote, “most like a bird, the foamy-necked floater went wind-driven over the sea-wave; … the seatimber thundered; the wind over the billows did not hinder the wave-floater in her course; the sea-goer put forth; forth over the flood floated she, foamy-necked, over the sea-streams, with wreathed prow until they could make out the cliffs of the Goths.”

Although the claim of Alfred the Great to be the founder of the British navy is now generally rejected by historians, it is certain that from the very earliest times the need of dominating the sea was present in the minds of Englishmen, and that this feeling gained in strength as the centuries rolled on and the value of sea-power became more and more apparent.