HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

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essential to the perfection of marine architecture, considerable care and pains werebestowed on the collection and maintenance of such a number of ships as mightawe the enemy, when they reflected on their numbers, and disregarded theirindividual inferiority. The Mediterranean was overspread by the ships of Britain,while the squadrons, if they could be said to deserve that name, and the shipsfitted out by France as intended cruizers, owed an inglorious security to thei rpatient continuance under the protection of their own batteries. On the side ofthe Atlantic alone, w’here the enemy scarcely possessed a sufficient number of shipsto form a single squadron of respectable force, Britain employed thirty-one shipsof the line in actual service, including those of fifty guns, independent of elevenothers, almost immediately fit for service, and nineteen which were bringing for-ward wdth the utmost assiduity. Awed into perfect quietude in this quarter also,Louis the Fifteenth avoided even the attempt of sending any force to sea, eitherfor the real purposes of war, or even those of mere bravado; so that the eventsof the w r ar certainly proved, in the end, propitious to the intentions and expecta-tions of those who were intrusted with the civil arrangement of the marine depart-ment, and the general management of those measures which were undertakenagainst the enemy. Baffled in every expedition where she attempted to act offen-sively, France not only found herself once more compelled to reluctantly foregoher favourite system of violence, conquest, and oppression, but was obliged tosubstitute in its stead the milder, and, to an arrogant nation, the much more de-grading scale of action, her own defence. The appearance of a French squadronon the ocean, was but the invariable forerunner of its discomfiture or capture;and as has frequently been the case, both in earlier and subsequent times, theonly certain means left to them of avoiding the violence of their enemies,appeared to be their avoiding every chance of contest wflth them.

The human mind scarcely finds itself capable of supposing, that those customsor practices w hich it has witnessed the existence of, have not prevailed in almostevery science, in a greater or less degree, even from its first origin. It has formany years been considered as an established datum, that the age of ships is ofnecessity confined within a certain period ; and although, on some particular'occasions of good fortune, and in peculiar cases, as well of care in construction, asin selection of materials, added to the inexperience of difficulties or dangers, those *limits may, on some occasions, be somewhat extended ; yet such enlargement isby no means common, or sufficiently material to effect any alteration in the prin-ciple, or cause any deviation from the arrangements which must be uniformlymade in the necessary provision for the exigencies of the naval service. To such

a re-