Of the nameless classics which were of so much concern to all of us when we were young, the most important were certainly those salt and blusterous volumes that told of pirates.  It was in vain for kindly relatives to give us books on Nelson and his like; for their craft, beautiful though they might be to the eye, had ever the moralities lurking between decks, and if we met them it was only that we might make their crews walk the plank, and add new stores of guns and treasure to the crimson vessel with the sinister flag which it was our pleasure to command.

And yet the books that gave us this splendid dominion, where are they now?  In truth, I cannot say.  Examination of recent boys’ books has convinced me that p. 183the old spirit is lacking, for if pirates are there, it is only as the hapless victims of horrible British crews with every virtue save that one which youth should cherish most, the revolutionary spirit.  Who would be a midshipman when he might be a pirate?  Yet all the books would have it so, and even Mr. Kenneth Grahame, who knows everything that is worth knowing, does not always take the right side in such matters.  The grown-up books are equally unsatisfactory to the inquiring mind.  “Treasure Island,” which is sometimes loosely referred to as if it were a horn-book for young pirates, hardly touches the main problems of pirate life at all.  Stevenson’s consideration for “youth and the fond parient” made him leave out all oaths.  No ships are taken, no lovely females captured, nobody walks the plank, and Captain John Silver, for all the maimed strength and masterfulness that Henley suggested to the author, falls lamentably short of what a pirate should be.  Captain Teach, of the Sarah, in the “Master of Ballantrae,” is better, and there were the makings of a very good pirate captain p. 184in the master himself, but this section of the book is too short to supply our requirements.  The book must be all pirates.  Defoe’s “Captain Singleton” repents and is therefore disqualified, and Marryat’s “Pirate” is, as Stevenson said, “written in sand with a saltspoon.”  Mr. Clark Russell, in one of his romances, ingeniously melts a pirate who has been frozen for a couple of centuries into life, but though he promises well at first, his is but a torpid ferocity, and ends, as it began, in words.  Nor are the histories of the pirates more satisfying.  Captain Johnson’s “History of Notorious Pirates” I have not seen, but any one who wishes to lose an illusion can read the trial of William Kidd and a few of his companions in the State trials of the year 1701.  The captain of the Adventure Galley appears to have done little to merit the name of pirate beyond killing his gunner with a bucket, and the miserable results of his pilferings bear no relationship to the enormous hoard associated with his name in “The Gold Bug” of Poe, though there is certainly a familiar note in finding included among his p. 185captives a number of barrels of sugar-candy, which were divided in shares among the crew, the captain himself having forty shares.  The Turkish pirates mentioned in “Purchas&rd............