However, various painters have seen fit to take the Pilgrimage of St. Ursula as their theme. Memling’s celebrated panels on the reliquary of that saint, now in St. John’s Hospital, Bruges, are of interest for our purpose, for no fewer than four of the six panels contain pictures of ships belonging to the period of the artist. The date of these miniatures is some time not later than the year 1489. Old printed books of the sixteenth century onwards frequently contain illustrations of ships of the time. Among the books, for instance, presented to the South Kensington Museum on the death of Lady Dilke will be found an interesting illustrated French translation of the Acts of the Apostles. The ships (of mediæval design) illustrating the Voyages of St. Paul are of value as showing the rig and details of the craft contemporary with the artist. These and similar illustrations, excepting always when the artist has become too fantastic and imaginative, are important links in connecting the story of the ships of ancient days with the modern full-rigged ship. Coming down to the seventeenth century, the paintings of the Dutch artists Jan Van de Cappelle, of Willem Van de Velde the younger, Bakhuizen, Ruisdael, and Cuyp give us the most interesting details as to rigging and hull. Claude’s picture, in the National Gallery, of the “Embarkation of St. Ursula,” painted towards the end of the seventeenth century, shows the high-pooped ship of his own day. Charles Brooking of the eighteenth century, Turner and Clarkson Stanfield of the nineteenth, show us in their pictures many invaluable minutiæ of sailing ships. And even if Ruskin’s criticism hold good, that Stanfield’s ships never look weather-beaten but “always newly painted and clean,” yet for our purpose this is no disadvantage; and it will be appreciated still more in a few years when our descendants go into art galleries to seek out from contemporary paintings the appearance of ships of the Victorian period.