Page:A Mainsail Haul - Masefield - 1913.djvu/138

This page has been validated.
126
A MAINSAIL HAUL

happy with the power of being fervent in season and out of season. If we may hazard an opinion, Dampier, who was not reared in the school of piety nor much touched by religious feeling, may have found his companion's pious ejaculations trying.

Knox was a captive among the natives in Ceylon for the best twenty years of his life, and his book is an account of his captivity, with some description of Ceylon as it was. "Whether hereafter they are ever or never read by anyone it is equially the same to me," he says. With a gush of the improving talk which he lets fly on these occasions, he tells us why it is the same. The burden of his song is very much—"Man is dust. Man, thou art a Worm. Man, a century hence you will be equially the same, whether in six feet or the moles of Adrianus." Probably he was not a gloomy man when he first went to sea. But to be ruined and kept in exile among an inferior race throws a man in upon himself; and Knox for many years led the life of the religious contemplative without the contemplative's solaces and safe-guards. It would not be fair to say that he came