THE DOCKYARD THE GIANT SHEARS.

racks, we will now enter the Royal Dockyard, whose gate fronts us. Here there are no difficulties of admission, from nine to half-past eleven, and from one to half-past five; and parties who have already entered the Dockyard, may remain within it during the intermediate hours.

See here the giant shears, which, in a space of time incredible for shortness, draws from the close-embracing depths of the vast

VITETELLY SE

ship its towering mast, with as much ease as your agile dentist whips from the stubborn mouth of his wincing patient the offending tooth. There lie, piled up and scattered about in orderly confusion, cannon shot in hundreds of thousands, anchors, and pieces of wide-mouthed ordnance; while here, again, the quick puff, puffing of steam blowing off, the vomiting of dense smoke in huge black rolling columns, the glow of furnace fires, and the ponderous thumping of a thousand hammers, tell of those vast triumphs of mechanical ingenuity by which bars of iron are twisted with the ease and lightness of a silk ribbon, and give the note of preparation

THE FORGING OF THE ANCHOR.

It were curious, were this a place for literary speculations, to inquire whence Schiller's fondness for the sound of the hammer, which he so often celebrates in his poems.

A more matter of fact description of the forging of the anchor is that by Charles Dibdin, in his famous song,

THE ANCHORSMITHS.

Like Etna's dread volcano, see the ample forge
Large heaps upon large heaps of jetty fuel gorge;
While, salamander like, the ponderous anchor lies,
Glutted with vivid fire through all its pores that flies:
The dingy anchorsmiths, to renovate their strength,
Stretched out in death like sleep, are snoring at their length,
Waiting the master's signal, when the tackle's force,
Shall, like split rocks, the anchor from the fire divorce;

While, as old Vulcan's Cyclops did the anvil bang,

In deafening concert shall their ponderous hammers clang,
And into symmetry the mass incongruous beat,

To save from adverse winds and waves the gallant British fleet.
Now as more vivid and intense each splinter flies,
The temper of the fire the skilful master tries;
And, as the dingy hue assumes a brilliant red,
The heated anchor feeds that fire on which it fed.
The huge sledge-hammers round in order they arrange,
And waking anchorsmiths await the looked-for change,
Longing, with all their force the mass to smite,

When issuing from the fire, arrayed in dazzling white;
And, as old Vulcan's Cyclops did the anvil bang,

To make, in concert rude, their ponderous hammers clang;

So the misshapen lump to symmetry they beat,

To save from adverse winds and waves the gallant British fleet.

The preparations thicken!—with forks the fire they goad;

And now twelve anchorsmiths the heaving bellows load,—
While armed from every danger, and in grim array,
Anxious as howling demons waiting for their prey.
The forge the anchor yields from out its fiery maw,
Which on the anvil prone, the cavern shouts-Hurraw!
And now the scorched beholders want the power to gaze,
Faint with its heat, and dazzled with its powerful rays;

While, as old Vulcan's Cyclops did the anvil bang,
To forge Jove's thunderholts, their ponderous hammers clang;
And till its fire's extinct, the monstrous mass they beat,

To save from adverse winds and waves the gallant British fleet.

But are these labourers? Is this the elastic step, the manly port of the British artisan? No; slowly crawling along in dusky grey files, under the vigilant guard of a sentinel, with fixed bayonet

A GROUP OF CONVICTS-A REFLECTION.

and musket ready loaded, move bands of convicts. Alas! how fallen from the noble state of free manhood-from the light, the life, the spirit, the intelligence that beams in the countenance of unsullied youth! That grey old man, with sunken eye, dejected visage, and form still portly, though stooping, was once the reverenced minister of a pious flock-the adviser and comforter of the aged-the respected and admired of fathers and their families-the affectionate guardian of the young. He is now a suborner of perjury, a forger, and a convict! What say you? "The hypocrite!" Beware! "Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." This man feared his God;-but he loved the world and its vanities; he dreaded to be poor; he desired riches-and he fell. You pity him -he was an educated man, forsooth! Look, then, at this youth; -the only one, the loved of his mother. His father, a soldier, died of sickness, and without glory, in some foreign land, one of our colony-garrisons; his mother nursed him, watched him, starved herself to feed him, prayed for him, worked for him, slaved for him, pined for him;-and this is her reward. The story need not be told; you may read it any day in the newspapers. Bad company and ignorance- selfishness - drunkenness and crime-Newgate -a broken heart watching in agony at that iron door-the trialthe sentence-the one loud mother's scream-the sullen, unrepentant son-the gasping sob-the dark, cheerless death-bed in that lonely room! And he-in the very morning of his days-shut out from hope and from nature in all its loveliness-all to him one long night-one dreary blank-to linger out his life a slave, crushed in heart and of broken spirit—a dog, and not a man. Ah! when you look upon those sullen and debased men, think that there is not one who, how bad, base, and mean as he may have been, was not the centre of a circle of some kind affections; think that, of that long grey file, there is not one man for whom and for whose guilt, and its ever-attending sorrow, some sad heart has not been broken.

Pass on, reader, though with a chastened spirit; such thoughts are not for excursions of pleasure. Look at the many-ribbed vessel on that slip, and its ingenious frame-work. Listen to the merry click, click, of the shipwrights' hammers, as they swarm, like bees in a hive, industriously within, above, around, and about

A VESSEL ON THE SLIP-HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS.

her timbers. She is now but a skeleton. Soon will her huge ribs be clothed and coated, and armed and animated within with stirring life; soon will her tapering masts

"Play with the clouds and mock the skies;"

soon will her bellying canvas woo the wanton gales, while, the Red Cross of St. George floating over her stern, she belches forth her farewell thunders to the shores of Britain, and to use the noble lines of Falconer, descriptive of a ship of war leaving the port of Corinth,

"Majestically slow, before the breeze

She moves, triumphant o'er the yielding seas."

Nor should we quit this dock-yard, the oldest, as Bishop Gibson says, in England, without recalling to our minds its historical associations. Here, in 1512, Henry the Eighth, a prince with much of the wisdom and capacity, though, unfortunately, not the conduct of his father, gazed, with a monarch's proud delight, on that noble ship the Harry Grace de Dieu (whose picture you may yet see in the Painted Hall at Greenwich). Then did that monarch make the noble and kingly resolve to strengthen the navy of England-a resolve never since lost sight of by her succeeding sovereigns—which he forthwith executed by enlarging these dockyards; for which purpose he engaged land of Sir Edward Bowater (a family whose name may still be seen about the court, and in high station in the army and navy lists); for a portion of which lands the government still do, or did until very lately, continue to pay a rent of £400 per annum. Hither, also, on a sunny 6th of June, in the year 1638, did a gay party come down in gilded shallops:

:

"Youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm,
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,

Which, hushed in grim repose, expects its evening prey!" A happy and a royal party (alas! how soon to be scattered by war, death, and treason!) on their way to breakfast at Greenhithe on board The Sovereign of the Seas, built here, and launched on the 7th of October, 1637. There, sweeping down the stream to the sound of trumpets, seated on rich cloths, with feathered hats and in velvet suits of pride and holiday, might be seen Charles the First, and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, the Duchess of Chevreuse, the Duke and Duchess of Lennox, and many a bright-eyed lady of the