Mather Byles, Judge Danforth, and Thomas Prince supported the movement in the _New England Weekly Journal_. Thomas Foxcroft and others, reinforced by a large part of the country ministers, fought the battle in sermon and pamphlet. Benjamin Colman gave the movement a qualified commendation. It found various classes of opponents. Charles Chauncy condemned it for its hot-bed sustenance, its “commotion in the passions,” and its precarious growth.[269] Thomas Fleet, the publisher of children’s books, turned the wit which enlivened his evening _vendu_ at the Heart and Crown, in Cornhill, into the columns of the _Boston Evening Post_, which he had just started. Here he held up Whitefield to ridicule, just as Joseph Green and other wits held up in the same place the pomp of Belcher to public derision. Dr. Douglass[270] reckoned up the thousand pounds sterling that were lost to the families of working people by what he called a misuse of time in attending the midday mass-meetings, to which Whitefield ministered. The passion and fervor swelled, lapsed, returned, dwindled, and died; some counted the wrecks it left, some wondered at its transient impressiveness, and a few occasionally struggled to revive it.[271] Amid all the consternation attending what William Cooper in the election sermon of 1740 called “an empty treasury, a defenceless country and embarrassed trade,” New England managed to raise 1,000 men to send off to join the fleet of Admiral Vernon in the West India waters. Scarce a hundred of them ever returned.[272] [Illustration: AN ENGLISH FLEET OF THIS PERIOD. From Popple’s great map, _The British Empire in North America_, 1732. Admiral Preble says in his “Vessels of war built at Portsmouth” (_N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg._, 1868, p. 393) that the “Falkland” was built in 1690, and carried 54 guns; but in some MS. emendations in the copy of his paper in the library of the Mass. Hist. Soc., he says she was probably built between 1694 and 1696. She is considered to be the earliest man-of-war built in the colonies. Within a short time after 1743, three vessels were built in New England for the royal navy,—the “America,” “Boston,” and “Essex.” The same writer, in _The United Service_, January, 1884, p. 98, etc., describing the changes in armament of vessels during the 18th century, defines ships-of-the-line as carrying 50 guns or more on three decks; frigates, 20 to 50 guns on two decks. Sloops-of-war with guns on one deck, and corvettes with guns on the poop and forecastle only, came in later.]