But despite opposition and hostility, lighthouses, for which rates were gathered, were built in considerable numbers, so that by the first half of the seventeenth century these welcome signals to the mariner broke forth into the gloom of night from many a dangerous headland of the English coast. Of course they were not erected in positions that called for the display of great engineering skill; reefs and shoals that lay far out at sea had to go unmarked till much more recent times. The ever-shifting Goodwins drew forth suggestions for indicating their dangers as early as the days of Queen Bess, but the suggestions emanated from those whose enterprise was greater than their capacity, and came to nought. The Eddystone lighthouse, fourteen miles from shore, was really the _first_ great engineering triumph connected with coast lighting, and Winstanley, with all his pedantry, deserves a niche in the Temple of Fame for having erected a lighthouse there at all! Floating lights, or lightships, were, I think, projected as early as 1623, though the project was not then actually carried into effect[1]; and they were proposed again, as ‘a novelty,’ half a century later at the Nore. But the Trinity House laughed at the suggestion, and the Nore remained without a light till 1730, or thereabouts, when the first lightship actually established was anchored there. But it is not fair to say thus much and no more about the Trinity House. Its history was written not long since by Mr. Barrett, and the reader who turns to this will see that if its ‘lighthouse policy’ was bad and illiberal, the utility of the corporation was manifested in many other ways; all through the reign of Charles I it was busy rendering efficient service to the Navy. The corporation dissuaded the king from building, merely for show, what was then a ‘big ship’—124 feet long, and 46 feet in breadth, and drawing 24 feet of water; no existing port could take such a ship, and no anchor or cable would hold her. The brethren might have preached from the lesson taught by the Armada; ours were the small craft that won in combat with the floating castles of Spain. ‘The wit and ingenuity of man,’ say the brethren, could not produce a seaworthy craft with three tiers of ordnance. If your majesty desires to serve the Navy, build two ships—the same money will do it!’ It is very curious to mark how Government got for nothing a great deal of valuable advice, and it is not very clear when the practical control of the dockyard at Deptford ceased to be in the Trinity House. All this time the corporation charities were not forgotten. Besides enlarging the almshouses at Deptford, they were building others at Stepney, and organizing means for the relief of aged seamen, which was practically a scheme for insurance against old age and sickness.