HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

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her distressful contest with France and the inhabitants of Messina. Theyhad, moreover, been so unguarded, not only to sell, in the true spirit of com-mercial speculation, a quantity of powder to the Algerines, but had, moreover,been so impolitic as to refuse making any concession whatever, for so heinousan offence.

Louis, in chastisement of these accumulated insults, dispatched his admiralDuquesne with a fleet consisting of fourteen ships of the line, a consider-able number of frigates and bomb-ketches, together with twenty gallies, totake that satisfaction which the delinquent state appeared resolute in refusing.The orders were executed with the utmost promptitude and exactness. Anincessant shower of bombs, which continued, till the whole number, amountingto fourteen thousand, with which the fleet was furnished, had been expended,laid the greater part of the city, and the whole of the many superb buildingswhich it contained, completely in ashes. France then found herself, for the firsttime, completely in a condition to prescribe laws to every state whose territoriesbordered on the Mediterranean, and even to assume a superiority above everyother nation in Europe, England and Holland excepted, but to both which shealso began to think she should be deemed no unworthy opponent.

A steady perseverance in the same energetic measures was productive of soextensive an augmentation, with respect to the French marine, that sevenyears had not elapsed since the event last mentioned, ere Louis, who withevery error and failing he possessed was the sincere and fast friend to those, forwhom he once professed an attachment, found himself, in consequence of hisconnection with the unfortunate James the Second, obliged to enter into acontest with the unitea forces both of Holland and Great Britain. The firsteffort made by him, in support of the exiled monarch’s desperate cause, wasthe equipment of an armament destined to escort James himself, with a con-siderable body of land forces, to Ireland. It consisted of 30 sail of two deckedships, mounting from 48 to 62 guns ; two others which were not consideredas of force sufficient to warrant their being stationed in a line of battle; andfive large frigates, carrying 36 guns each : independent of these, there werethirteen other vessels, fireships, flutes, and storeships, attached to the fleet.

This fleet, formidable as it might be thought, and strongly as its equipmenttended to prove that facility with which a prince, who has once raised himselfinto power, can suddenly oppose or attack any country he chuses, was but amere escadre legere , or flying squadron, compared with that which in the

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