Moreover, the smallest British 74 carried 32-pounders on the lower deck, while the smallest French 74, although upwards of 100 tons larger, carried only 24s. It is true that a French 24-pounder weighs a few pounds more than an English gun of the same nominal caliber; but that overplus is amply compensated by the difference in size between the two ships.

The gradual swell of the current of architectural improvement has, however, given increased size and buoyancy to the English modern-built ships of every class ; many of which equal in dimensions and form, and surpass in strength and finish, the ships of any other power on the globe.* Still, those national navies, which, owing to frequent discomfitures, have been the oftenest renewed, are, in this respect, the most uniform; while that single navy, which has remained for ages unimpaired by defeats, and which has usually added to itself what the others have lost, exhibits in many of its classes the utmost variety of size. Its reduced scale of complements, ever its well-known characteristic, is owing, partly to the contracted size of its ships, and partly to a principle of pure native growth, a reliance upon the physical, rather than upon the numerical, strength of its seamen,

* It is but justice in regard to America, to mention that England has benefited by her example, and that the large classes of frigates now employed in the British service are modelled after those of the United States.-Editor.

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