However numerous the fleets which our Anglo-Saxon kings were capable of occasionally collecting--as, for instance, Edward the Confessor when threatened by an invasion from Norway--it is evident but little progress had been made towards establishing a permanent naval force. For when William the Conqueror invaded England, although his great preparations were matter of notoriety, and he had taken no pains whatever to conceal his design, the attempt was not made to encounter him at sea; all was left to the issue of the battle upon land. And William himself had so little appreciation of any naval power attached to the possession of the island, that he burned his ships as soon as he had landed, merely to give his men an additional motive for their courage. Sir Harris Nicolas has given us here an engraving of the vessel in which William himself set sail from Normandy--a copy from the celebrated Bayeux tapestry; and on several other occasions we are presented with etchings taken from some antique representation. These are well to have, and curious to look at; but it is very difficult to extract any information whatever from such designs, it being impossible to know what is to be attributed to the rude state of the pictorial art, and what to the rude condition of naval architecture. It would be almost as safe to take our notion of a Chinese _junk_ from the ships we see sailing in the sky upon their porcelain ware, as to derive our ideas of William the Conqueror’s ship from the tapestry of the Empress Matilda and her ladies. Though needle-work was in such repute and perfection, that we are told by Miss Strickland, quoting Malmsbury, how “the proficiency of the four sisters of King Athelstane in weaving and embroidery procured these royal spinsters the addresses of the greatest princes of Europe,” we must still take leave to think that the fidelity of representation was often somewhat sacrificed to the exigencies of the worsted work. In this engraving, the unhappy pilot or steersman, while he is working his paddle-rudder with one hand, holds the sail in the other, holds it bodily by the sheet in his extended hand, without the assistance of any belaying pin, or even of a rope. Are we to infer from this, that the simple expedient of turning a rope round a pin to hold the sail the firmer and the easier, with capability of slackening it at pleasure, was unknown in these times, or that the fair artist had but slender knowledge of the management of sailing craft? We are informed that the original exhibits a tri-coloured sail of three broad stripes, brown, yellow, and red: who can tell us whether these gay colours had any other origin than the taste of the needle-woman, and the claims of the worsted work? Sir Harris Nicolas has gravely observed that there are more shields hung round the outside of the vessel than there are men within it--which might have been anticipated without counting them, as it was