have not done so already, restore their prestige. We have no doubt that eventually iron will become almost the sole material used in ship-building; but before it drives its rival off the face of the waters, some means must be invented of rendering iron proof against the decaying influence of sea-water, and of preventing the rapid formation of organic growths upon it, which is now such a great objection to its more extended use. The large number of passenger-steamers that have been built of late years has added very much to the confidence felt in the use of iron for hulls; for, as they could be docked at short intervals, on their return from their foreign trips, the disadvantage of rapid fouling has not been much felt in them. But it is very different with a vessel of war, which is often away from the neighbourhood of a dockyard for years. The French are so keenly alive to this great drawback that they have at present only built one iron-armoured ship, La Couronne; and the results obtained from her have been by no means so satisfactory as those given by her wooden sisters. In nothing will a future naval war differ so much from those of the past as in the character and form of the ships that will strive for mastery upon the deep. Not only has the class of vessels which Nelson commanded, and so often led to victory, completely passed away from the active list of the navy, but even the superior ships in which Codrington combated the Turks on the day of Navarino, and the more improved squadron which, under Stopford, fought at St. Jean d'Acre, have followed it. And, later still, the powerful screw liners, such as the Agamemnon, which in the attack on Sebastopol proved herself so well worthy of her name, and of the gallant chief whose flag flew on board her, have become things of the past, and only hold their places on the list because there has not yet been time to construct iron-clads enough to supersede them. Should war again break out between the great naval powers, we shall see, probably, long low frigates in the line of battle where the three-decker towered of old; and we shall certainly see clouds of smoke darkening the pall that hangs over the fight. There will be no manoeuvring to gain the weather-gage, or longings for a freshening breeze to hasten the fleets into action; but, like the charge of the light brigade at Balaclava, the fleet will rush forward to the battle, and trust to daring and bravery, and the strength of their good ships, to win. It is by no means clear, however, that wood will not hold its place still for smaller vessels, for all police-purposes on the sea, and for the protection of our commerce and colonies abroad. As in all past time, so in the future, our naval force must depend upon that of other nations. Thus, in course of time, it will be necessary for us to have some iron-clads at Vancouver, if we are to retain that colony. Halifax, too, must become a station for iron-clads; and the sooner a dock capable of receiving them is constructed there the better. There must be some in the West Indies also; though, unless the Americans build something on a better type than the Monitor, they need not be very numerous. Malta must necessarily become a principal station for them; and no time should be lost in making the dockyard there suitable in all respects for their repair. The Indian Government will be forced to have one at least at each of the principal ports; and the great colonies of New South Wales and Victoria seem to be already moving in the same direction. There is, no doubt, a strong feeling amongst seamen against the unsightliness of some of the new iron-clad vessels. The same poetical attachment to beauty of form and colour which denounced paddle-wheels, and hesitated to sacrifice the old swan-like whiteness of sails, so hopelessly begrimed by the smoke of our screw-ships, is opposed to all the modern changes, which seem like a relapse from the beauty of the gazelle to the clumsy and massive form of the antediluvian megatherium. Old sailors feel that the poetry of a sea-life is passing away, and that the nautical profession will lose half its charms. It was long before they could lay aside their love for snowy sails and spotless decks, and give in their adhesion to steam; but they did so eventually, and learned to regard their less comely, but more powerful, vessels with the same affection which they felt for the dear old ships in which they had spent so many years. So, the iron-clads have already won the hearts of their officers and crews. They are roomy, well-ventilated, comfortable vessels, with space for every thing and every body. They are also preeminent in force and power; and the true hearts and skilful hands, which are all they need to direct them, will never, if the past is any warrant for the future, be wanting till England has ceased to be a nation. EPIGRAMS.1 Ir an anthology of epigrams is to be any thing more than a hortus siccus of faded flowers, it must have a different arrangement from that which Mr. Booth has adopted in the collection he has recently published. Readers and writers alike have lost the taste which a century or two ago enabled men coldly to turn so many hundred old jokes into as many centuries" of distichs and quatrains, and to win the laurel crown by them. Our modern poets and wits may put forth an occasional epigram on a striking event; but we have no professed epigrammatists, because the public would no more endure to read through book after book of detached conceits than to peruse consecutively the columns of a dictionary. Unless a way can be found to combine them into a more or less consistent whole, or to give them an extrinsic interest by making them illustrate historical changes, or national modes of thought, collections of epigrams will always be classed with such books as Joe Miller, Scroggins' Jests, burlesques, and Ana. But an arrangement might easily be made in three divisions-the first containing epigrams upon the Greek model, or exercises of poetical and terse expression; the second including all the satirical or panegyrical scraps which have been made upon public events or public men; and the third containing all the pointed epigrams, the versified puns and jokes, which are simply exercises of wit, and have no particular application to historical occurrences. In this way a collection of epigrams would illustrate the progress of poetical expression; would furnish the running commentary of the clubs, the drawingrooms, and the academies, upon the events, the ideas, and the prominent men of different ages and countries; and would be an excellent repertory of jokes and sharp sayings. This threefold division is the same which Klopstock makes in his Gelehrtenrepublik. The epigram, he says, is either an arrow to prick with its point, or a sword to cut with its edge, or a little picture which enlightens, but does not burn, with its ray. It is also the historical one. The term epigram was originally applicable not merely to an inscription for a monument, but to any marks lightly scratched on a surface. In Homer, epigraphy was on skins; not on parchment, but man's living body, on which the glancing arrow or dart left 1 Epigrams, ancient and modern; humorous, witty, satirical, moral, panegyrical, monumental. Edited, with an introductory preface, by the Rev. John Booth. London: Longmans. its mark. The superficial nature of the scratch was essential to the idea; a deeper cut would have had another name. The Greek "character" as developed by Theophrastus differs from the Greek epigram as sculpture does from sketching, or the bust from the silhouette. The epigram seized a single point, a single aspect of an idea. The "character" built up a compound idea out of many details, and combined them in proper harmony and perspective. The first literary epigrams, expressly so called, were the words or lines inscribed on a monument-a temple, tomb, tablet, or statue-to indicate in the simplest way what it was, to whom it was erected, or what it commemorated. For this purpose lines or distichs from hymns, national songs, or funeral elegies were naturally chosen; whence, perhaps, the predominance of the elegiac metre in the Greek and Latin epigrams. Among the most famous instances of this kind is Simonides' inscription for the heroes of Thermopylæ : 'Ω ξειν, ἄγγειλον Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε "Stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here, in obedience to their commands." And Ennius's epitaph for P. Scipio Africanus : "Hic est ille situs, cui nemo civi' neque hostis Quivit pro factis reddere operæ pretium." "Here he lies whose deeds no countryman or stranger could ever recompense." But the brief notes which the epigrammatist had to make were not always complimentary. There was something in the very brevity of the epigram more fitted for expressing contempt than admiration. Praise delights in platitudes; its favourite figure is amplification. The epigrammatic inscription was soon found better adapted for stigma than panegyric, so that the word "inscribed" became the proper term for the branded slave,' and the stigma itself was called an epigram. Scratching the face and defaming the character were described in similar terms: "Charaxat ambas ungulis scribentibus says Prudentius; while Suetonius uses the phrase, "versiculis perpetua stigmata imponere." In English the word "nick" was used for such ridiculous marks: "His man with scissors nicks him like a fool," says Shakespeare. The nickname Sometimes also it was * IL. IV. 139; XI. 338; xш. 139; Od. xx11. 280. on the pebbles with which lots were cast, Il. vII. 187. 3 Plin. xxii. 3; Gell. xvii. 9; Mart. viii. ep. 74. 4 Petronius, 103. is probably that which cuts and notches upon the man the note of his prominent absurdity. It is therefore a true epigram. Nothing can be simpler, terser, or more pointed than the change of Tiberius Nero into Biberius Mero to express his tippling propensities. Whether the person is nicknamed from the thing, as here, or the thing from the person, as Dunce from Duns Scotus, the result is equally epigrammatic. Indeed it is more cutting to make a Blenker furnish a general nickname for plunderers, than simply to stigmatise him as a thief. The brief inscription, panegyrical or satirical, was the first epigram expressly so called. But if the knack of cutting its appropriate name on a thing is the foundation of the epigrammatic art, it is clear that the art must have existed long before it was expressly named. The first epigram was extorted from man by the impressions which nature made upon him, and by the necessity he felt of giving voice to them. The earliest epigrammatists were those who first impressed a vocal and articulate mark upon the pictures of the imagination and the senses, or who set themselves to make the articulation more clear, and to give the vocal symbols greater terseness, exactness, strength, harmony, and beauty. Such were all the early poets; they were creators, not of the ideas which were common to them and their audience, but of the harmonious and appropriate language in which those ideas were expressed. Every vocal expression of any idea is an epigram when it does not profess to give the whole character, or to fathom all the depths of the idea, but seizes on the most prominent characteristic, and seeks to signify it by the most appropriate sound. Like a name, the epigram is a mark, a symbol, a token, but not a complete representation of the thing signified. It is an attempt to express without defining or describing,-to find the tersest, most laconic, or most harmonious way in which a thought may be conveyed, by a single flash, into another mind. The chief art of the poet consists in the architecture of his fable or characters, and in the beauty and nobleness of his ideas. The art of the epigrammatist is to find the most suitable dress for any given idea. The poet, therefore, deals with the whole, the epigrammatist with the details; and if a poet is not called an epigrammatist on account of his success in finishing the separate pieces of his work, it is because the parts are so overshadowed by the whole that the epigrammatic expression seems only to be the unsought and spontaneous reflection of the vivid poetic impression. The first characteristic of the epigram-namely, that its essence consists in the expression, as distinct from the im |