The first of Marryat’s books is one which, for reasons very neatly stated by himself, may stand apart from the others. When he had given it three successors, he thought fit to publish a proclamation on the subject of his work in the _Metropolitan_, and in that document he described “Frank Mildmay” as fairly as any honest critic could do for him.
“‘The Naval Officer’ was our first attempt, and it having been our first attempt must be offered in extenuation of its many imperfections; it was written hastily, and before it was complete we were appointed to a ship. We cared much about our ship and little about our book. The first was diligently taken charge of by ourselves; the second was left in the hands of others, to get on how it could. Like most bantlings put out to nurse, it did not get on very well. As we happen to be in the communicative vein, it may be as well to remark that being written in the autobiographical style, it was asserted by good-natured friends, and believed in general, that it was a history of the author’s own life. Now, without pretending to have been better than we should have been in our earlier days, we do most solemnly assure the public that, had we run the career of vice of the hero of ‘The Naval Officer,’ at all events, we should have had sufficient sense of shame not to have avowed it. Except the hero and the heroine, and those parts of the work which supply the slight plot of it as a novel, the work in itself is materially true, especially in the narrative of sea adventure, most of which did (to the best of our recollection) occur to the author.… The ‘confounded licking’ we received for our first attempt in the critical notices is probably well known to the reader--at all events we have not forgotten it. Now, with some, this severe castigation of their first offence would have had the effect of their never offending again; but we felt that our punishment was rather too severe; it produced indignation instead of contrition, and we determined to write again in spite of all the critics in the universe: and in the due course of nine months we produced ‘The King’s Own.’ In ‘The Naval Officer’ we had sowed all our wild oats, we had _paid off_ those who had ill-treated us, and we had no further personality to indulge in.”