“To the first division belong the construction, the size, rig, appearance, tonnage, armament, stores, equipment, and expense of the various classes of vessels; the manner in which ships and seamen were obtained by the crown, and the number and description of the officers and crews, their pay, provisions, prize-money, and discipline. Under this division, every thing else relating to the navy has been noticed; namely the Cinque Ports, dock-yards, lighthouses, pilotage, maritime laws, the law of wreck, taxes and other contributions for naval subsidies, the Court of Admiralty, the right of England to the sovereignty of the seas, the invention of the compass and of the modern rudder, the national flag, &c. To these statements are added biographical notices of the admirals, and other persons, who have been eminently distinguished for their talents or prowess at sea. “The second division treats only of active naval proceedings; that is to say, the employment of ships in piratical acts, military expeditions, remarkable voyages, and, of course, all sea-fights.” Here, it will be observed, is a wide range of subjects on which information is promised, and so far as the work has advanced, the performance by no means belies the promise: on almost all these topics something is added, of more or less importance, to the stock of our knowledge. The classification, however, here adopted has this great inconvenience, it obliges the author to travel twice over the same epoch, first for his civil, and then for his military history of the navy. As the same public events are necessarily alluded to in both departments, an air of repetition is thrown over the book, and the reader finds himself on two or three occasions brought back to the commencement of some king’s reign,--an Alfred or a Richard Cœur-de-Lion,--whom he thought he had left long ago behind him. This repetition Sir Harris Nicolas is not unconscious of, but thinks it “inevitable;” we cannot help thinking that a little more pains bestowed on the arrangement of his materials might have obviated this disagreeable effect, produced by the retracing of his steps. With a little more labour of the _artistic_ kind, with a little more attention to the subordinate toils of composition, he might, we imagine, have so kept his materials together as to have come down the stream of time in one voyage, with both civil and military equipage on board. This ascending again and descending a second time, with a cargo which to all appearance might have been stowed away on the first voyage, gives an unusual tediousness to our mode of progression. This want of a skilful arrangement, and dexterous blending of his materials, together with the dryness of some of the details--which many readers will think should have been relegated to an appendix--will operate against the popularity of the work. But a popular work it was not the ambition of Sir Harris Nicolas to produce: he has compiled one which will be highly useful to