Imagine yourself as a visitor at Portsmouth on any afternoon almost of the present year of grace, and observing what takes place in the harbour round the _Victory_. Here comes along, sliding swiftly past between ship and shore, a long, low-built black torpedo-boat; or a yet more grim-looking sleuthhound of the sea, a thirty-knot destroyer, with squat funnels and high-raised forecastle, from which peers forward the long barrel of a twelve-pounder, shearing its way ahead on business of its own. Now a snub-nosed gunnery-school gunboat passes, returning from a day’s target-practice out beyond the Warner lightship, with a weapon that can fire from twelve to twenty aimed shots in a minute. Then, it may be, a brand new twenty-three-knot cruiser passes, coming back from a trial run, or a huge high-sided four to five hundred feet long battleship of from fifteen to eighteen thousand tons, stern and resolute of appearance, her giant barbette guns of massive bulk and enormous length, weighing each from fifty to sixty tons, and able to send an eight hundredweight twelve-inch shell from fifteen to twenty miles, and with the certainty of being able to hit the mark with each shot at half that range—the horizon limit from on board. It was not so long ago that one of our battleships (the _Commonwealth_), firing at eight thousand yards at a target representing an enemy’s battleship, dropped successive twelve-inch shells into a space the size of a lawn-tennis court, and, at the same distance at the third round, shot away a boat’s flagstaff that topped the target. At all times, too, there is a passing and repassing of Navy steam-launches and pinnaces, and now and again the busy forging to and fro of puffing harbour tugs and yard craft of all sorts. Such are every-day sights in Portsmouth Harbour in these times of ours. Then carry your mind back to the year in which the _Victory_ first figured on the Estimates of the Navy—1758. Imagine yourself standing on the Hard as a sightseer in the Portsmouth of the Seven Years’ War time—on, say, a day in October of the year when my Lords at Whitehall were making their final decision about the ship’s dimensions. At this same moment, by the way, there is lying in a far-off parsonage, in an out-of-the-world locality on the Norfolk coast, a puny baby boy, a fortnight or three weeks old, so sickly that he is not thought likely to live. So weakly, indeed, is the child that his baptism—at which the name Horatio was given to the small babe—has taken place privately, just six days after his birth. You would, in Portsmouth Harbour on that October afternoon of 1758, have seen something very much like this.