James II., and the labouring oar was taken by the indefatigable Pepys, and between them the naval service had on the whole fair-play down to the time of the Revolution. The duke introduced improved signals, and Pepys kept the accounts in order. When James II. mounted the throne, he found 179 vessels, measuring 103,558 tons. He took immediate measures for improving the navy. He suspended the Navy Board, and appointed a new Commission, with which he joined Sir Anthony Deane, the best naval architect of the time, who materially improved the ships of the line by copying from a French model. 400,000l. per annum was the sum set apart for naval purposes; and so diligent were the Commissioners, that at the Revolution the fleet was in excellent condition, with sea-stores complete for eight months for each ship. The force was 154 vessels, of which nine were first-rates, carrying 6930 guns, and 42,000 men.

Scientific navigation continued to be patronised during the whole of this period: during the latter half of it under the auspices of the Royal Society. The sailing and fighting men of the navy had not, however, become so thoroughly fused into one class as they are in our day. Blake never was at sea till he had passed forty, and it may be questioned whether he was ever much of a navigator. He asked his pilot, or master, to lay him alongside of the enemy, and his self-possession, fearlessness, and pertinacity did the rest. The Montagues and Albemarles, who commanded under the Restoration, were not much of seamen: they trusted the navigation of their vessels to the mariners-their business was to fight. They were followed on board, when they hoisted their flags, by volunteers from the court. They were high caste" waisters." The peculiarities of British men-ofwar were not fully developed so long as this system continued. It is fashionable to speak of the fleet as republican during this period: this is one of the meaningless generalisations of historians. The sailors were all for their profession, and for the land that owned their ships. They troubled their heads as little about politics then as now. Some of Blake's and Deane's old roundhead captains retired from the service in disgust after the Restoration, as did many of the old roundhead captains from the army; and, as the power of conceiving a devoted attachment to such abstractions as forms of religious and civil policy is generally indicative of a higher grade of intellect, doubtless some of the best men were thus lost to both services; but these were exceptional cases. The habit of sending land generals to fight naval battles, kept the real seaman's spirit under. It is not to the literature of this age that we are to look for illustrations of the scaman's character. In the days of Chaucer they furnished good subjects to the artist; in the days of Shakspere, and since the Revolution, ample use has been made of them. But Congreve's moon-calf Ben is almost the only type of the sailor that was smuggled into the regions of art during the period now under review.

It was not long after the Revolution that the Admiralty took up its abode here in the official residence where we are spinning this yarn. It was in 1688 that the management was permanently put in Commission. The office of Lord High Admiral was held by an individual till 1632. In that year it was intrusted to a Commission, of which all the great officers of State were members. During the Commonwealth the affairs of the navy were managed by a com

mittee of parliament, till Cromwell took the direction of them upon himself. The Duke of York was Lord High Admiral during the greater part of the reign of Charles II.; when he ascended the throne he took the charge into his own hands. Since the Revolution the office has always been in Commission, with two brief exceptions already noticed. The Revolution government, looking about in search of a residence for its naval Commissioners, placed them for a time in a house associated with rather a disagreeable reputation. The son of the infamous Jefferies soon wasted his father's ill-got gains by his dissolute and extravagant conduct. He was obliged to sell, with other property, the house which James II. had allowed the judge to build in Duke Street, with a gate and steps into the park. The house was bought by government, and converted to the use of the Commissioners of the Admiralty. From this they soon removed to Wallingford House, opposite Scotland Yard-the building from the roof of which Archbishop Usher had witnessed the execution of Charles I., and fainted at the sight. In the reign of George II., the present structure was erected on the site of Wallingford House, by Ripley; and, in the reign of George III., the architectural screen, now in front of it, was drawn by the decent hand of Adam, to veil its homeliness. Here has been the head-quarters of the Admiralty ever since it left the mansion of Jefferies.

The improvements made in the naval department of government, since the Revolution, have consisted chiefly in those details of management which escape the notice of the public. Its more prominent features have remained, on the whole, unaltered. The instrument wielded by the Admiralty has grown with the nation's growth in stature and in perfection of its organisation. Theoretical improve

ments have made their way slowly, but not the less surely. The example of the revolutionary government of France was required to spur on the Admiralty to establish a telegraph. It was not till 1795 that the important officer, the hydrographer, was permanently annexed to the Board. Within these few years the steam-ships of the royal navy have been regularly increasing. And during the time that Sir James Graham had a seat at the Navy Board, important improvements were made in the system of general management, that have rendered the Admiralty the best organised department of the Imperial government. In 1839 the British navy consisted of 392 vessels of all kinds, of which 175 were in commission, 149 in ordinary, and 68 building: 34 were steam-vessels, of which only four were in ordinary; of these, however, no more than seven appear to have been adapted for purposes of war. There were, besides, 30 steamers employed in the packet-service of Great Britain. The vessels composing the navy are divided into three classes-the first of which consists of what are called rated ships; the second of sloops and bomb-vessels, or vessels commanded by a commander; the third of such smaller vessels as are commanded by a lieutenant, or inferior officer. The first class comprises ships of six rates :-the first-rate, all three-decked ships; the second, all two-decked ships, whose war complements consist of 700 men and upwards; the third, all ships whose complements are from 600 to 700; the fourth, ships whose complements are from 400 to 700; the fifth, ships whose complements are from 250 to 400; the sixth, ships under 250. Vessels of the first, second, and third-rates are called line-of-battle-ships. A 92-gun ship carries six eight-inch guns on its lower, and four on its main-deck, each weighing 65 cwt. ; and twenty-six 32-pounders on its lower deck, and 30 on its main-deck, each weighing 56 cwt., besides six, each weighing 42 cwt., on its upper-deck. This weight of metal, stored up in one floating fortress, may help to convey, even to those who have never seen that majestic object a first-rate man-of-war, some idea of its terrible power for destruction; and the true might and beauty of the ship may be faintly imagined when its buoyancy, the apparent ease with which this huge heavy mass turns and cuts its swift way through the water is conceived. The dark threatening hull alow, the swelling white sails and tapering masts aloft, as, like "the swan on still St. Mary's lake," which "floats double, swan and shadow," the first-rate lies mirroring itself on the glassy ocean-or tearing through the surge beneath a gale in which small craft could not keep the sea, its bright copper sheathing flashing like the brazen scales of Spenser's dragon, as it leaps from one mountain wave to another, one is tempted to believe that it was an excess of diffidence in the Promethean power of man, that made us deny him at the outset of these remarks the power of clothing in beauty the ministering servants created by his genius. Less imposing, but scarcely less terrible to an enemy, is the multitude of smaller vessels, less formidably armed, which, on the breaking out of a war, this nation can let loose to swarm in every gulf and bay, very wasps and hornets, stinging the foe in the most vital parts.

To man this navy there were voted in 1839-40, rather more than 20,000 seamen of all ranks, and 9000 marines. That is a peace establishment. It has already been remarked that the peculiar character generally attributed to the British tar may be said to have been formed since the Revolution. It partook

at first of that homeliness and even carelessness which characterised more or less the whole English nation when the Hanoverian family ascended the throne. When we wonder at the Hawser Trunnions of Smollett, we must keep in mind the manners of the real Walpole—the licence taken in matters of language by Lady Mary Wortley Montague-above all, the minute details of common decency and cleanliness which Chesterfield expressed with such solemnity. We undervalue that great reformer, because every child knows and practises what he preached, but it is because he preached it. And amid all that undeniable rudeness which made the sailor of those days the stock subject of caricaturists and burlesque writers, there existed that stock of unostentatious decision in action. and shrewdness of practical judgment in the sphere with which he was familiar, which is the groundwork of the British seaman's character. There was a quiet grandeur about the higher order of spirits in the navy at that time. In homely majesty of character no man perhaps ever surpassed Lord Anson. Favoured in the outset of life by his good connections, he rose in the service in a manner that showed he must be a good steady officer, but necessarily implied nothing more. Twelve years of his life he was contented to let his ship "ground on his beef bones on a Carolina station;" entering into the pursuits of a planter with as much gusto as his elder brother into those of a country gentleman; a universal favourite in the colony, but alleged by the ladies to be fonder of listening to music than of dancing to it, and most happy over a quiet bottle with a professional friend. But he rose with the occasion, and though involved in many perilous emergencies, never failed to prove great enough for the most trying. In the hour of impending shipwreck, or on the quarter-deck on the eve of battle, he was imperturbable, apparently apathetic till the moment for action came, and then his impetuosity first revealed the tremendous power of the iron will which must have held such energies in check. His conduct towards his prisoners, especially the females, during his cruise in the Pacific, was marked by equal courtesy and high moral self-control to what has immortalized one classical hero. As a promoter of the sciences which bear upon his profession, and as a civil administrator, he proved that his intellect was worthy to be mated with his chivalrous heroism and morality. And all this under the cloak of a homely, retiring, and even awkward manner. The disregard of show which characterised men like Anson became fashionable in the navy: our seamen prided themselves on being men who could do much and say little. It was their boast that rollicking tarry jackets could fight better than the gilded or pipe-clayed martinets of the land-service. Even in excess this is an honourable ambition, and it is to be hoped that the anxiety to prove themselves "no shams" will remain unaltered now that the changed tone of general society and the extension of scientific education are smoothing off the rough angles of the seaman's deportment. Science has never been neglected by him. Halley's observations were in due time followed up by the experimental trials of Meyer's lunar tables. Anson was not alone in that extensive study he made of Spanish discoveries before he sailed on his great voyage, or in his care to eke out what he had learned by necessary observation and inquiry while it lasted. Phipps preceded Cook; and the paternal discipline of that great navigator, and the conversation

of the men of science shipped on his voyages, trained a new and more intellectual class of officers-the Vancouvers, Kings, Blighs, Burnets, and Broughtons. Education has done its part. The Naval College trains commissioned officers, and the Lower School at Greenwich trains warrant officers and private seamen. Christ's Hospital has long sent an annual tribute to the navy. And the Hydrographer's Office finds encouragement and employment for all who choose to cultivate the science of their profession. The efficiency of our navy is increased; our naval men occupy a front rank in the national literature and science; and in the senate the sailor feels his full value recognised, and conforms to the prevailing tone of society.

It is neither an unpleasant nor an unprofitable task to note how the British naval officer has been polished without being made effeminate. The sailors of Marryat and poor Tom Cringle (to give him the name by which he is best known) contrast widely with those of Smollett and his contemporaries, but in refinement of manners alone;-the same wild and reckless glee, when for a time cast loose from service-the same coolness and relish for mischief or danger, indifferent which stimulant offers itself, provided one of them does offer-the same carrying of the single-heartedness of the boy into the matured intellect of the man. Tom Cringle and Peter Simple are genuine descendants of Tom Pipes and Lieutenant Hatchway; and Master Keenc-Marryat's bold attempt to lend an interest to a sharp self-seeking calculator of how closely a man may tread upon dishonesty-would, in ruder times, have grown up into one of Smollett's tyrannical captains. And yet it is a curious speculation-what would the old rough sea-dogs have thought of their successors? Tom Pipes thought it was all natural enough in Peregrine Pickle to write the letter which honest Tom wore to rags in the sole of his shoe, and possibly did not despise the schoolmaster who composed a substitute for him; but what would he have said of officers in the navy publishing novels, like Marryat; and books of travels for young masters, like one whom we have lost by a more melancholy stroke than death-the amiable and accomplished Basil Hall?

Enough of the gallant men of whose eyes the Admiralty is the cynosure: we return to the house itself. It will at once be seen that here is not room for the whole of the managers of the huge instrument of national power just sketched in outline. It spreads over the whole of London. Here are the council-rooms and the residences of the senior Lords; and if you pass the broad easy flight of steps by which access is attained to the public apartments, and ascend the narrow dark stairs beyond it, you will find yourself in the labyrinth of narrow passages, conducting to small rooms crowded with boxes and drawers full of charts, in which the busy hydrographical department is constantly at work. On the west side of the great square of Somerset House are the Victualling, Navy-Pay, and Transport branches of the Navy Office. The west terrace of the same structure contains the official houses of the Treasurer and the Comptroller of the Navy, of three Commissioners of the Navy Board, and the principal officers of the Victualling Department. Other branches of the management of the navy must be sought at Sheerness, Portsmouth, Plymouth, and even in the colonial dockyards. Greenwich, with its Upper and Lower Schools, and its Hospital, is a