The unrivalled triumph of human invention is the instrument by which all those powerful qualities are brought into play: a ship of the line, with all its stores, its crew, and its guns on board, is the wonder of the world. What must be the dexterity of the arrangement by which a thousand men can be victualled, at the rate of three meals a-day, for four months; a thousand men housed, bedded, clothed, and accoutred; a battery of a hundred and twenty guns--the complement of an army of fifty thousand men, and two or three times the weight of field-guns--fought; this mighty vessel navigated through every weather, and the profoundest practical science applied to her management, through night and day, for years together? No combination of human force and intellectual power can contest the palm with one of those floating castles, of all fortresses the most magnificent, the most effective, and the most astonishing. The history of the British navy, in its present form, begins with that vigorous and sagacious prince, Henry VII., who was the first builder of ships, calculated not merely for the defence of the coast, but as an establishment of national warfare. The strong common-sense of his rough, but clear-headed son, Henry VIII., saw the necessity for introducing order into the navy; and he became the _legislator_ of the new establishment. He first constructed an admiralty, a Trinity-board for the furtherance of scientific navigation; appointed Woolwich, Deptford, and Portsmouth as dockyards, and declared the naval service a _profession_. Elizabeth, who had all the sagacity of Henry VII., and all the determination of his successor, paid especial attention to the navy; and the national interest was the more strongly turned to its efficacy by the preparations of Spain, which was then the paramount power of Europe. When the Armada approached the English shores, she met it with a navy of one hundred and seventy-six ships, manned with fourteen thousand men. And in that spirit of wise generosity, which always marked her sense of public service, she doubled the pay of the sailor, making it ten shillings a-month. The defeat of the Armada gave a still stronger impulse to the popular feeling for the sea; signals were formed into a kind of system, and all the adventurous spirits of her chivalric court sought fame in naval enterprise. From that period a powerful fleet became an essential of British supremacy; and the well-known struggle of parties, in the time of the unfortunate Charles, began in the refusal of a tax to build a fleet. In the early part of his reign, Charles had built the largest ship of his time, "The Sovereign of the Seas," carrying one hundred guns.