These fine old line-of-battle ships were large and powerful before the seventeenth century ended. Thus in the British navy when 1700 came in there were eight which had from ninety-six to one hundred and ten guns each—fifty-three others carrying more than seventy guns, and twenty-three more with more than fifty guns—all at that time regarded as fit for the line of battle, though a hundred years later nothing less than a “seventy-four” was so considered. Such were the grandly picturesque old vessels that won the day at Gibraltar, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and at many another spot where the whole horizon echoed to their thunderous broadsides; but of them all there now remain only a few honored hulks in harbors, or a few grand figureheads preserved in docks and museums. Each navy, however, had a greater number of smaller, more active vessels, known as frigates, corvettes, sloops-of-war, gun-brigs, etc., which carried from twenty to forty-four guns, and were the “eyes of the fleet,” as one old strategist styled them. They answered to what we should now call cruisers, and often went on duty in distant parts of the world, or in war were scouting about and supporting the main fleet. This class was especially cultivated by the United States, as soon as it began to make a regular navy, at the close of the Revolutionary War, and six frigates were built at our six navy-yards during the last years of the last century, which were intended and proved to be separately “superior to any single European frigate of the usual dimensions” in speed, manœuvering, and fighting power, in proportion to their weight of ordnance. Three of them (_Constellation_, _Congress_, and _Chesapeake_) mounted thirty-six guns, and three (_United States_, _President_, and _Constitution_) forty-four guns each—mainly 24-pounders; and all gave so good an account of themselves, as ships, that the high compliment was paid us of their being carefully imitated by foreign naval constructors. This is not a naval history, so that I am not concerned to tell of all the glorious or inglorious work of the navies of Europe in obtaining and holding, or failing to get and keep, trade routes open and territorial possessions intact in various parts of the world. During the seventeenth and eighteenth and far into the nineteenth century, there was no time when some nations were not fighting on the sea if not on land; and much of the time _all_ the maritime nations were hard at it, turning their guns to-day on the allies of yesterday, and fighting shoulder to shoulder with them the next season against some friend of the year before. A few of the most famous battles ought to be spoken of, however, as illustrating the methods and development of naval warfare, and because we now recognize that their consequences were far-reaching.