The reader, remembering the treatment allotted to Rousseau, will probably infer that Cellini was looked upon with no favourable eye by the Church. He had long discovered that it will 'not serve us in this world to be merely men of honesty and talent,' and accordingly he went about on quite other principles. These principles served him well; and not even the Church would condemn his methods, in the face of his worldly success. On his death he was buried with public honours in the Church of the Annunziata, an oration being delivered during the ceremony in praise and honour of his life and works and of 'the excellent disposition of his soul and body.' Cellini did not question the authority of the Church, and therefore he might do what he liked.

'Yes, for the pious, I suspect

All instruments are fitting.' (Faust.)

Does the study of biography throw any light on the great philosophical problems of life and mind? Can it answer the perpetual question cui bono? to what purpose should we live our life, what is the end that we should aim at ? Surely, if these questions are answerable at all, they should be answerable by an intelligent study of the greatest lives among mankind. Money was not the main object with any of them. Though a necessity of life, only the sordid-minded make it the chief aim. Ambition likewise was a very secondary consideration with all of them, and in some of them had no force whatever. Goethe puts his sentiments into the mouth of Faust:

'Cursed be at once the high ambition
Wherewith the mind itself deludes !
Cursed be the glare of apparition
That on the finer sense intrudes !
Cursed be the lying dream's impression
Of name, and fame, and laurelled brow!
Cursed, all that flatters as possession,
As wife and child, as knave and plough!
Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures
To restless action spurs our fate!

Cursed when, for soft, indulgent leisures,

He lays for us the pillows straight!

Cursed be the vine's transcendent nectar,—

The highest favour Love lets fall!

Cursed, also, Hope! - cursed Faith, the spectre !

And cursed be Patience most of all!'

For this and other quotations from Faust' in English, we have made use of Bayard Taylor's translation.

If neither money nor ambition were the chief stimulant of these men, to what must we turn? Desire to benefit humanity is a laudable object, which we should like to assign to them if we could; but we cannot. Spencer thought he wrote his 'Philosophy' for that purpose; but he was wrong. The one point that they all had in common was in putting to the most vigorous possible use such talents as had been given to them. Just as one man receives one talent, and another man ten talents, so the endowments of humanity vary not only in amount, but in kind.

And the only philosophical lesson we can learn from these lives is that-whether the talents were good or bad, large or small-they were in each case drawn upon and exercised to the maximum extent of their capacity. Unenslaved by any theory, each lived his life to its fullest capacity:

grey are all theories

And green alone Life's golden tree.'

Those who are for ever seeking some ulterior object of existence, who are asking about first causes and metaphysical purpose, are the victims of a mental weakness, which carries them away from real facts and brings them, like a moth to the candle, to questions which have no answer, which are wholly useless, and which probably are only even raised as the outcome of partially developed minds. Yet such questions, by diverting attention from more serious questions, do illimitable injury:

the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.'

If biography can teach this lesson as to the mainspring of human activity, its study is abundantly justified. If we learn to strive not for money, nor for ambition, not even for what we think the public welfare, but simply to make the best of our talents whithersoever they may lead, we may be sure that at all events our life will not have been wasted.

ART. V.-THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SEA.

The Sovereignty of the Sea: an Historical Account of the Claims of England to the Dominion of the British Seas and of the Evolution of the Territorial Waters: with special reference to the Rights of Fishing and the Naval Salute. By THOMAS WEMYSS FULTON, Lecturer on the Scientific Study of Fishery Problems, the University of Aberdeen. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood. 1911.

E VERYONE who has read Peter Simple,' that is everyone who has been an English boy, has at least been told that ships of all other nations used to lower their topsails, and take in their flag in presence of the flag of England. He may not remember it; he may not have understood it; he may have doubted it; but he has been told it, and it is true, though wanting the explanatory clauses, in the English seas,' and ' or there was strife.' This was indeed the instruction given to all naval captains and commanders for a period of almost exactly 600 years, that is, from 1201 to 1806; from the second year of John to the date marking England's greatest naval power, the year after Trafalgar. Forgetting this, and ignoring or ignorant of the fact that the maritime power of England was by no means supreme during the whole of this period, people have very often spoken of the remarkable claim as based and resting throughout on that maritime ascendancy which, often non-existent while the claim was urged and fought for, was at its highest when the claim was voluntarily given up. This may be held to show that it did not rest on that ascendancy, and was not a piece of brag or a vainglorious contention as many people have said, and as indeed seerns the opinion of Mr. Fulton, who in the book whose title stands at the head of this article, has undertaken 'An Historical Account of the Claims of 'England to the Dominion of the British Seas,' without, as it appears to us, a full understanding of the claims, or rather claim, which he has to investigate; and thus his book, though abundantly rich in all that relates to fishing, is led into error and confusion by the idea, first started early in the seventeenth century, that the dominion of the sea and the right of property in the fish were the same, could not be separated, and were necessarily limited by each other.

Mr. Fulton has certainly read and now quotes much of our early history that contradicts this view; but then he has also

read and quotes much from the writings of later controversialists which support it; and quoting now one, now the other, there appears from time to time in his pages an extremely puzzling contradiction-or rather a contradiction, which would be extremely puzzling, were we not able to explain it by the suggestion that the author has written about fisheries, because not only was he intimately acquainted with the several problems and discussions which beset, and have beset, the rights of fishing, but was literally soaked in their literature, until they had entered into and formed part of his mental being; while, on the other hand, he has studied our naval history and the claims to the dominion of the sea, because he wanted to write about them. The difference is, in fact, much the same as exists, in the realm of fiction, between the historical novels of Scott and of his would-be successors; or, in the domain of art, between a portrait by Reynolds or Romney, and a modern photograph from Baker Street or Piccadilly.

It is only in this way that we can explain the author's want of familiarity with many of the great names of naval history, scarcely one of which is rightly spelt, of the men who have made naval history, as well as the great events which belong to them, and of his frequent reference for them to second-hand or modern authorities, while for the questions directly relating to the fishing he goes to the fountain head, the State Papers' or the original writers. It is only in this way that we can explain his constant confusion of the claim to the sovereignty of the sea-which dated from the time of John, if not from the time of John's father (Henry II), or still earlier, from the time of his father's great-grandfather (William I)-with the claim to the fishing rights, first made by James I, or the theory of the Mare Clausum, against which the whole course of Elizabeth's reign was a practical protest. This, indeed, Mr. Fulton admits.

'Early in her reign,' he says, Elizabeth had occasion to protest against the claims of Portugal, and had a heated dispute with King Sebastian about them. Later, the daring exploits of Drake on the Spanish seas were more than a flagrant violation of Philip's pretension to mare clausum in the western Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans -a claim which Elizabeth refused to recognise. When Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, complained to her in 1580 of Drake's depredations, and that English ships presumed to trade in the "Indian" seas, he was told in effect that the Spaniards, contrary to the law of nations, had prohibited the English from carrying on commerce in those regions, and had consequently drawn the mischief upon themselves. ... Her subjects would continue to navigate "since "the use of the sea and air is common to

"that vast ocean

all; neither can any title to the ocean belong to any people or private man, forasmuch as neither nature nor regard of the public use permitteth any possession thereof."'

But on the very same page on which he has quoted this he continues:

'Elizabeth has been charged with inconsistency on the ground that at the time when she was asserting the freedom of the seas against the claims of Spain she was claiming for herself, " with very great energy," a similar dominion in the British seas. The charge is quite unfounded. No claim was put forward by her to the sovereignty of the British seas. On the contrary, they were declared to be free for the navigation and fishery of all nations,'

and this though he has noted several instances in which foreign ships did recognise the claim in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One point he has not noted that as the order was given, it was presumably obeyed; that our men-of-war exacted the salute as a matter of course, and that, when it was paid, as in ordinary course, no record remains; that only exists where things did not go in ordinary course; where for some reason the salute was not insisted on, as in the instance cited by Mr. Fulton as occurring in 1552.

'The Baron de la Garde was in command of a French fleet of twelve men-of-war, and Sir Henry Dudley, whose force was weaker, asked how he should act," touching the pre-eminence of honour to be given" when he met the Baron. The council replied that "in respect of the amity and that the said Baron is stronger than he upon the seas, sometimes yield, and sometimes receive the honour and he was told to use the Baron courteously, "and with such discretion that the same yielding of the pre-eminence may be interpreted to be of courtesy rather than to the derogation of the King's honour."'

Much more to the purpose is a noteworthy instance occurring in 1449, which Mr. Fulton has overlooked, possibly as being a date at which our naval prestige was admittedly low, and when our un-friends were advising us to take the ship off our coins and put on a sheep instead. If we can fancy Mr. Fulton arguing-the honour of the flag was not insisted on when we were strong it assuredly would not be when we were weak. In historical writing it is dangerous to confuse ‘it was ' with it must have been,' and, in fact, in April 1449, Robert Wenyngton of Devonshire was commissioned to do the King service on the sea, for the cleansing of the same, and rebuking of the robbers and pirates thereof, which daily do all the ' nuisance they can.' And a very interesting account of his