It was probably a mistake to stop at Portsmouth. I had done so, however,
in obedience to a familiar theory that seaport-towns abound in local
colour, in curious types, in the quaint and the strange. But these
charms, it must be confessed, were signally wanting to Portsmouth, along
whose sordid streets I strolled for an hour, vainly glancing about me
for an overhanging façade or a group of Maltese sailors. I was
distressed to perceive that a famous seaport could be at once untidy and
prosaic. Portsmouth is dirty, but it is also dull. It may be roughly
divided into the dock-yard and the public-houses. The dock-yard, into
which I was unable to penetrate, is a colossal enclosure, signalised
externally by a grim brick wall, as featureless as an empty blackboard.
The dock-yard eats up the town, as it were, and there is nothing left
over but the gin-shops, which the town drinks up. There is not even a
crooked old quay of any consequence, with brightly patched houses
looking out upon a forest of masts. To begin with, there are no masts;
and then there are no polyglot sign-boards, no overhanging upper
stories, no outlandish parrots and macaws perched in open lattices. I
had another hour or so before my train departed, and it would have gone
hard with me if I had not bethought myself of hiring a boat and being
pulled about in the harbour. Here a certain amount of entertainment was
to be found. There were great iron-clads, and white troopships that
looked vague and spectral, like the floating home of the Flying
Dutchman, and small, devilish vessels whose mission was to project the
infernal torpedo. I coasted about these metallic islets; and then, to
eke out my entertainment, I boarded the _Victory_. The _Victory_ is an
ancient frigate of enormous size, which in the days of her glory carried
I know not how many hundred guns, but whose only function now is to
stand year after year in Portsmouth waters and exhibit herself to the
festive cockney. Bank-holiday is now her great date; once upon a time it
was Trafalgar. The _Victory_, in short, was Nelson's ship; it was on her
huge deck that he was struck and in her deep bowels he breathed his
last. The venerable vessel is provided with a company of ushers, like
the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey, and it is hardly less solid
and spacious than either of those edifices. A good man in uniform did me
the honours of the ship with a terrible displacement of _h_'s, and there
seemed something strange in the way it had lapsed from its heroic part.
It had carried two hundred guns and a mighty warrior, and boomed against
the enemies of England; it had been the scene of one of the most
thrilling and touching events in English history. Now, it was hardly
more than a mere source of income to the Portsmouth watermen--an
objective point for Whitsuntide excursionists--a thing that a foreign
observer must allude to very casually, for fear of seeming vulgar, or
even serious.