i will not think of 'this is such a pity" by weezer as a bush/hornblower song. i will not think of

[quigonejinn]

1. Years later, when Pellew was an earl and Hornblower himself was a lord and married to a Wellesley, he ran into a man that he had known as a midshipman: the Earl of Edrington was, by then, solidly built. He was much heavier and out of uniform, but Horatio remembered the narrow nose, the tight mouth, and the bearing. He also remembered the retreat from the beach.
   
   
2. Kennedy had not intended to be the least bit friendly to the new midshipman.
   
   There was, however, something about life on a ship without Simpson. And the midshipman -- just about Archie's age -- looked so miserable in the cold and the damp and so shocked by life below deck. And his family name was Hornblower.
   
   
3. There were plenty of sea battles that Bush could have dreamed about that night -- both the first and second battles with the Natvidad, the last days of the Sutherland, the desperate flight of the Witch of Endor. He was the sort of man who dreamed about signal flags and the binnacle while sleeping in a shore leave bed, so all of these battles were fresh in his mind. He had also commanded a prize crew at Trafalgar, and he remembered the shipboard fight on the Renown as clearly could be expected, so he was not lacking in memories that he could have lived again.
   
   Nevertheless, that last night before he died, William dreamed about the Hotspur and their fight, in the storm, with the Loire -- tack and tack again. Hiding, for a moment, in a gust of rain. The coast of Ushant, the damnable weatherliness of the Loire with her deep hull and tonnage, the damanable competence of the French captain matching them tack after tack. The jerk that the Hotspur had given when Hornblower gave the sign for Prowse to send up the jib -- the ship had jumped like a living thing jerking underneath the crack of a whip, and they flew past the Loire, dead in the water.
   
   William had intended to walk alongside the battery, giving the order to fire for each gun individually so that each shot would count, but the ship was moving too fast. The wind was too much with them; they were flying over the water, and they were thirty yards, now twenty, now fifteen yards apart, so close that William could have taken out his pistol, stuck his arm out a gun port and shot at the deck of the Loire. That was the quarterdeck, that was the main mast, that was the stern up ahead already, so in the end, he just shouted for the captainsto fire as they would.
   
   He remembered that the ship had been barely rolling at all -- a little pitch, but no roll -- and Bush could remember very clearly the feel of the wood underneath his shoes.
   
   That and the feeling, at long last, now that they were finally outstripping the Loire, of speed. They had almost even been moving too quickly.
   
   
4. Bush was not, by nature, a reserved man. Nevertheless, years in the His Britannic Majesty's Navy had given him enough so that expressions rarely covered his whole face. Surprise made him raise one eyebrow. Smiles lifted one side of his mouth and usually the side facing away from the party in the conversation, which he could usually do because he preferred talking side-by-side, in the manner of officers at the rail on the quarterdeck, to speaking face to face.

And my favorite quote of the day so far from my re-reading of Hornblower and the Hotspur, from the morning after they )(@*#)(@* schooled a whole host of French shipping right under the noses of the French on-shore battery and while they are making their getaway:

"Fire away, Monseer le Frog," said Bush. "The damage is done."

:D