Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/532

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June 2, 1860.]
A CRUISE IN A TUB.
519


Not mourn for thee? Ah, lying grief!
The tears which will have way,
O’erburden’d Nature’s kind relief,
But seem to disobey.
It is but for ourselves we weep,
For our own loss repine;
Ah, God! unwittingly we keep
That dying charge of thine, Mary!

If, in that better world on high,
Where thou art dwelling now,
Thou yet canst bend a pitying eye
On us who weep below;
Oh, whisper, from that glorious sphere
The selfish love forgiven
That would have bound a Martyr here,
And grudged a Saint to Heaven, Mary!

Harry Leroy Temple.




A CRUISE IN A TUB.

Amid the varied improvements in naval architecture to which the latter half of the nineteenth century has given birth: at a time when a man-of-war may undergo so many alterations in the course of construction, that before she is launched all traces of the model on which she was designed are lost, there are still extant vessels with the distinguishing initials H.M.S. before their names, to which the profane are apt to apply the significant, if uncomplimentary epithet of “tub.” And in so doing, these scoffers may be considered merely to imply that the craft in question does not reach their ideas of perfection. But in the year 1782 the term “tub” possessed in the British Navy a more special signification. In the vocabulary of those days a tub was a forty-