teristic enough of the department which makes it. “We cannot adopt the new anchor, because the contracts for the old one are not yet out, and will not be for a dozen years.” What would the nation say if our artillery engineers had made the same improvident and imbecile contract in the case of guns, and had refused our tried Armstrongs and Whitworths, because they had a contract running with the Carron company for the old smooth-bore sixty-eight pounders?
The point, perhaps, of the greatest attraction, and one which the officials never fail to laud with the utmost extravagance, is the block manufactory, where the blocks, great and small, for the rigging of the British fleet, are manufactured. When the machinery for this purpose was first designed by the elder Brunel, in 1801, it was, doubtless, a very great advance upon the hand labour of the yard; and, probably, was viewed with astonishment by the somewhat fossil heads of the dockyard authorities—an astonishment and admiration which seems to have come down to the present time; but it is no offence to the memory of the great engineer who invented it to say that it is now grown very antiquated, and altogether behind the time, and is not by any means to be compared with many of the remaining new processes for saving labour now to be seen in operation either at the small arm factory at Enfield, or at the great arsenal at Woolwich. I would no more have desired to have hinted as much to the six-foot policeman who acted as my cicerone, than I would have given a free opinion on a point of theology to the Archbishop of Canterbury. We are told that the number of blocks in a full rigged ship is not less than 1432: this number of course refers to the old three-deckers; but as our modern heavy frigates are rigged in a far simpler manner than those sailed by our fathers, this estimate can no longer be accepted; and what perhaps with our new reefing apparatus, and our shield ships, the old-fashioned block will ere long be superseded by some new invention.
As we talk of shield ships, we find ourselves beside the dry dock which holds the Royal Sovereign—that is to be one day, a specimen of the new craft. We can imagine the inventor tearing his hair—if the obstructions thrown in his way by the department have left him any hair to tear!—and exclaiming, “How long—yet how long!” The Royal Sovereign, a specimen of a three-decker of 110 guns, built we believe by the late surveyor of the Admiralty, not only never went to sea, but never even left the dock in which she was built. Two years ago she stood a noble-looking craft, when that wicked man, Captain Coles, forced his ideas upon the “lotos-eaters” at Whitehall, and the word was sent to cut her down. It has been remarked that the dock-yard men never seem to work with such a will as when they are pulling to pieces, and in this case in a very short time the mighty frame of this “first rate” was razed to her water-line. Here however, all the efforts of the shipwrights seemed paralysed, and the work of reconstruction, when we saw her about three months ago, appeared to be in the hands of the government “man and the boy,” and these redoubtable individuals seemed to be working as leisurely as though they were caulking and repairing a Thames lighter—a craft which the cut-down leviathan now most mightily resembles—rather than working out one of the latest ideas of science as regards naval architecture. But can we expect the moving spirits at the Admiralty to be over-anxious that the new kind of war craft should succeed? “My Lords,” who have passed their days of service in roomy ships, with fine poop cabins, and stern galleries, and in full command of flush decks, on which Jack, when work was done, danced for their own and his delectation, to the music of the merry fiddle, cannot be expected to bear any good will to these iron turtles, the chief merit of which consists in casing up their inmates in walls of iron, that let in light only from overhead (and not too much of that), and absolutely deny a peep at anything but the eternal blue of the sky above. “My Lords,” could not be brought willingly to agree to such a living death as this. Moreover, our gallant heroes like to fall in the arms of victory upon their own quarter-deck; but, according to Captain Coles’ scheme this will be impracticable: at all events, even Nelson could not have died in a dignified manner upon the top of the inverted kitchen candlestick—for such is a Coles’ patent cupola, to say the best of it. But this is the British Admiral’s point of view of the new design. Possibly the British public may have a different idea of the matter, and may wonder, as we know it does, after the experience of these cupola ships gained in actual conflict on the other side of the Atlantic, that such disgraceful apathy is shown in putting the new idea to the test in our own waters.
LOVE SONG.
The sweetest flower of latter spring,
That only breathes the breath of May;
The prettiest finch on painted wing,
By dropping acorn scared away,—
My Love is fair and shy as they.
A bashful violet of a maid,
She trembles at a gust of care;
But then she’s fairest when afraid,
Her blue eyes look up in a prayer,—
My little Love is good as fair.
Once I came back: she sat alone,
Past midnight, in a dusky room;
On face and hair the firelight shone—
Ah, happy me! when through the gloom
I heard her sigh, and knew for whom.
Smiling that night, and crown’d with flowers,
All eyes but mine my Love had seen;
I knew the music of those hours
Was witching, but my little Queen
Had sigh’d for me, her smiles between.
I care not if her face be cut
To shape of artists’ fantasies;
The light of it is nameless, but
Fills all my dreams, and when I rise
I follow it to my Love’s blue eyes.
