Admiral Dumanoir were met and captured off Cape Ortegal on the 4th of November by a British squadron of five ships under Sir Richard Strachan. The stormy weather which followed the battle gave the enemy an opportunity to retake some of the prizes, and others were lost. Four only were carried into Gibraltar by the British fleet—three French and one Spanish. Only eleven of the allied fleet succeeded in finding safety in Cadiz. The fragment of the French squadron remained there under Admiral Rosily till he was forced to surrender to the Spaniards in 1808 on the breaking out of the Peninsular War. The loss of life of the allies cannot be stated with precision. In the British fleet the reported loss in killed and wounded was 1690, of whom 1452 belonged to 14 out of the 27 ships of the line present—the inequality of loss being mainly due to the fact that it was as a rule these vessels which came earliest into action. For the circumstances of Nelson's death see the article Nelson.
Authorities.—Accounts of the battle of Trafalgar are to be found in all the naval, and most of the general, histories of the time. The most essential of the original authorities are collected by Sir N. Harris Nicolas in his Despatches and Letters of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, vol. vii. (London 1844–1846). The controversy as to the exact method on which the battle was fought, and the significance of the signal to bear down, is fully worked out with many references to authorities in The Times from the 14th of July to the 21st of October 1905, both in a general correspondence and in a series of articles on "Trafalgar and the Nelson Touch," 16th, 19th, 22nd, 26th, 28th and 30th of September 1905; see also J. S. Corbett, The Campaign of Trafalgar (1910).
TRAFFIC, properly the interchange or passing of goods or merchandise between persons, communities or countries, commerce or trade. The term in current usage is chiefly applied collectively to the goods, passengers, vehicles and vessels passing to and fro over the streets, roads, sea, rivers, canals, railways, &c.
The origin of the word is obscure. It occurs in Fr. trafique, and trafiquer, Ital. traffico, trafficare, Sp. trafago, trafagar. Du Cange (Gloss. Med. el Inf. Lot.) quotes the use of traffigare from a treaty between Milan and Venice of 1380, and gives other variants of the word in medieval Latin. There is a medieval Latin word transfeeator, an explorer, spy, investigator (see Du Cange, op. cit., s.v.) which occurs as early as 1243, and is stated to be from transfegare, a corruption of transfretare, to cross over the sea (trans, across, fretum, gulf, strait, channel). Diez (Etymologisches Worterbuch der romanischen Sprachen) connects the word with Port, trasfegar, to decant, which he traces to Late Lat. vicare, to exchange, Lat. vicis, change, turn. A suggestion (Athenaeum, app. 7, 1900) has been made that it is to be referred to a late Hebrew corruption (traffik) of Gr. Tpoira'Uds, pertaining to a trophy, applied to a silver coin with the figure of victory upon it and termed in Latin victoriatus.
TRAHERNE, THOMAS (1637?-1674), English writer, was, according to Anthony a Wood, a "shoemaker's son of Hereford." He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1652, and after receiving his degree in 1656 took holy orders. In the following year he was appointed rector of Credenhill, near Hereford, and in 1661 received his M.A. degree. He found a good patron in Sir Orlando Bridgeman, lord keeper of the seals from 1667 to 1672. Traherne became his domestic chaplain and also " minister " of Teddington. He died at Bridgeman's house at Teddington on or about the 27th of September 1674. He led, we are told, a simple and devout life, and was well read in primitive antiquity and the fathers. His prose works are Roman Forgeries (1673), Christian Ethics (1675), and A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God (1699). His poems have a curious history. They were left in MS. and presumably passed with the rest of his library into the hands of his brother Philip. They then became apparently the possession of the Skipps of Ledbury, Herefordshire. When the property of this family was dispersed in 1888 the value of the MSS. was unrecognised, for in 1896 or 1897 they were discovered by Mr W. T. Brooke on a street bookstall. Dr Grosart bought them, and proposed to include them in his edition of the works of Henry Vaughan, to whom he was disposed to assign them. He left this task uncompleted, and Mr Bertram Dobell, who eventually secured the MSS., was able to establish the authorship of Thomas Traherne. The discovery included, beside the poems, four complete "Centuries of Meditation," short paragraphs embodying reflexions on religion and morals. Some of these, evidently autobiographical in character, describe a childhood from which the "glory and the dream" was slow to depart. Of the power of nature to inform the mind with beauty, and the ecstatic harmony of a child with the natural world, the earlier poems, which contain his best work, are full. In their manner, as in their matter, they remind the reader of Blake and Wordsworth. Traherne has at his best an excellence all his own, but there can be no reasonable doubt that he was familiar both with the poems of Herbert and of Vaughan. The poems on childhood may well have been inspired by Vaughan's lines entitled The Retreat. His poetry is essentially metaphysical and his workmanship is uneven, but the collection contains passages of great beauty.
See Bertram Dobell's editions of the Poetical Works (1906) and Centuries of Meditation (1908).
TRAILL, HENRY DUFF (1842-1900), British author and journalist, was born at Blackheath on the 14th of August 1842. He belonged to an old Caithness family, the Traills of Rattar, and his father, James Traill, was stipendiary magistrate of Greenwich and Woolwich. H. D. Traill was sent to the Merchant Taylors' School. He rose to be head of the school and obtained a scholarship at St John's College, Oxford. He was destined for the profession of medicine and took his degree in natural sciences in 1865, but then read for the bar, being called in 1869. In 1871 he received an appointment in the education office which left him leisure to cultivate his gift for literature. In 1873 he became a contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of Frederick Greenwood. He followed Greenwood to the St James's Gazette when in 1880 the Pall Mall Gazette took for a time the Liberal side, and he continued to contribute to that paper up to 1895. In the meantime he had also joined the staff of the Saturday Review, to which he sent; amongst other writings, weekly verses upon subjects of the hour. Some of the best of these he republished in 1882 in a volume called Recaptured Rhymes, and others in a later collection of Saturday Songs (1890). He was also a leader-writer on the Daily Telegraph, and acted for a time as editor of the (Sunday) Observer. In 1897 he became first editor of Literature, when that weekly paper (afterwards sold and incorporated with the Academy) was established by the proprietors of The Times, and directed its fortunes until his death. Traill's long connexion with journalism must not obscure the fact that he was a man of letters rather than a journalist. He wrote best when he wrote with least sense of the burden of responsibility. His playful humour and his ready wit were only given full scope when he was writing to please himself. One of his most brilliant jeux d'esprit was a pamphlet which was published without his name soon after he had begun to write for the newspapers. It was called The Israelitish Question and the Comments of the Canaan Journals thereon (1876). This told the story of the Exodus in articles which parodied very cleverly the style of all the leading journals of the day, and was at once recognized as the work of a born humorist. Traill sustained this reputation with The New Lucian, which appeared in 1884 (2nd ed., with several new dialogues, 1900); but for the rest his labours were upon more serious lines. He directed the production of a vast work on Social England in 1893-1898; he wrote, for several series of biographies, studies of Coleridge (1884), Sterne (1882), William III. (1888), Shaftesbury (1886), Strafford (1889), and Lord Salisbury (1891); he compiled a biography of Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer (1896); and after a visit to Egypt he published a volume on the country, and in 1897 appeared his book on Lord Cromer, the man who had done so much to bring it back to prosperity. Of these the literary studies are the best, for Traill possessed great critical insight. He published two collections of essays: Number Twenty (1892), and The New Fiction (1897). In 1865 his Glaucus; a tale of a Fish, was produced at the Olympic Theatre with Miss Nellie Farren in the part of Glaucus. In conjunction with Mr Robert Hichens
