Excerpt from Sketches in Ultra-Marine, Vol. 2
Diplomacy is like a funeral. It invests everybody engaged in it with an air of sacred importance for the time. Reflect on this, reader, and you will see that it is unusually true for an epigram. Doth not poor Hobbins, slowly marching with his black wand, look a loftier creature than his brother plebeian? Even so our friends at embassies seem great men, from their occupation; and naval captains become so, of course, when diplomatic duties devolve on them. The captain of the Intolerable, for example, was twice the man, at least, when visiting a consul in the Archipelago on political business. The captain of the Verdant landed an armed party to call the Pasha of Snobkali to account for an insult to the British flag, and made the Pasha apologise. Yet the captain of the Verdant was not personally an important man! Intrinsically, indeed, he was Adam Jones, R.N., with scarcely talent enough to manage a country post office.
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