We need not, however, go so far as Warsaw, or back to the year 1829, for examples of an unwillingness on the part of the modern mind to break entirely with the traditional spirit. Our own country is remarkable both for the steadiness of its advance towards a future widely different from the past, and for an affectionate respect for the ideas and institutions that it gradually abandons, as it is forced out of them by new conditions of existence, I may mention, as one example out of very many, our feeling about the reconstruction of the navy. Here is a matter in which science has compelled us to break with tradition absolutely and irrevocably; we have done so, but we have done so with the greatest regret. The ships of the line that our hearts and imaginations love are the ships of Nelson and Collingwood and Cochrane. We think of the British fleets that bore down upon the enemy with the breeze in their white sails; we think of the fine qualities of seamanship that were fostered in our _Agamemnons_, and _Victories_, and _Téméraires_. Will the navies of the future ever so clothe their dreadful powers with beauty, as did the ordered columns of Nelson, when they came with a fair wind and all sails set, at eleven o'clock in the morning into Trafalgar Bay? We see the smoke of their broadsides rising up to their sails like mists to the snowy Alps, and high above, against heaven's blue, the unconquered flag of England! Nor do we perceive now for the first time that there was poetry in those fleets of old; our forefathers felt it then, and expressed it in a thousand songs.[7] LETTER III. TO A LADY WHO LAMENTED THAT HER SON HAD INTELLECTUAL DOUBTS CONCERNING THE DOGMAS OF THE CHURCH. The situation of mother and son a very common one--Painful only when the parties are in earnest--The knowledge of the difference evidence of a deeper unity--Value of honesty--Evil of a splendid official religion not believed by men of culture--Diversity of belief an evidence of religious vitality--Criticism not to be ignored--Desire for the highest attainable truth--Letter from Lady Westmorland about her son, Julian Fane.