nter, but it was sufficiently proved that
there were grave faults in the _Captain's_ construction,--faults which,
as is unfortunately too often the case, were not discovered by such
calculations as were made before the ship started on what may be said to
have been her first, as it was her last, cruise. It had, however, been
noticed by some that the vessel was about a foot and a half deeper in
the water than she should have been--that her free-board, in a word,
instead of being eight feet above the water, as was designed, was only
six feet six inches; and it needs but a very slight knowledge of marine
matters to understand how this difference would materially prejudice the
stability of such a vessel as the _Captain_.

If it has been the reader's chance, as it has been ours, to visit anyone
of our great naval arsenals--especially Portsmouth or Plymouth--he
cannot have failed of being struck with the gallant and splendid
appearance presented by many of our ships of war; but he must likewise
have been affected with feelings the reverse of admiration by more than
one type of modern ironclads. No one who admires a real ship, be it of
wood or of iron--a stately frigate in full sail before a favouring
wind--can at the same time admire a monitor. Many persons, in truth,
will refuse to regard a turret-ship as a ship at all. It overturns our
every notion of what a ship should look like. A low, black, mastless,
raft-like, cruel-looking machine, without the faintest pretension to
form or comeliness, a turret-ship is simply a fighting-engine, a
floating battery--an ingenious and formidable instrument of death and
destruction, no doubt, but nothing more. Yet these are among the
leading war-ships of the present, and, as far as can at present be seen,
of the immediate future; and on these we must depend for the protection
of our shores should they ever be threatened.

And yet, great as is the annual cost of our navy, and great as is the
amount of ingenuity spent in the construction of new and novel ships of
war--each designed to be more impregnable and more formidable than its
predecessor--our navy is at this moment in somewhat of an unsettled and
transitory state. Changes in the construction of ironclads are every
year taking place, and considerable difference of opinion exists among
our highest naval authorities upon important points in marine
architecture. Ships of war have now to contend with such formidable
enemies in the