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those glorious old days, still remembered with a sigh of regret by a few very elderly gentlemen of sporting tendencies, when the noble science, as its votaries called it, was one of the specialities of every English gentleman, from princes of the blood to “seedy bucks,” it must have been a curious study for any one not bitten with the prevalent mania to observe the care and pains bestowed upon the heroes of the ring, to watch how the universal interest concentrated itself for the time upon the pair of brawny louts who were getting ready to bruise nature’s noblest handiwork out of all recognisable shape and proportion, how the noblemen and the young bloods who led the fashion were wont to make up parties, and drive down to their man’s training quarters in all sorts of quaint-looking vehicles whose bizarre outlines have been preserved for us by undying Gilray; how they inspected, and overhauled, and cross-examined their pet; how they instituted the strictest inquiries into his diet, his clothing, his habits, his indulgences; how they one after another watched their opportunity to take his trainer aside, and confidentially direct him to let the Chicken want for nothing, and to spare no expense, so that he was brought to the scene of his contest “as bright as a star, and as strong as a lion;” how, returning to town, each set cracked up its man to the other; how they bragged of the hardness of his thigh and the development of his flexor; and how they laid each other swingeing bets on the event. How, moreover, the common sort followed, sheep-like, in the wake of the young bloods, and in taverns and wine-shops, and gambling-houses, and even in the rude settles of country road-side inns, discussed after their fashion the news of the animal’s progress, and laid modest wagers on the man of their choice. All this has passed away from among us, and we go mad, and speculate, and argue, and wager about matters of heavier moment it may be—that is, if weight of metal is to kick the beam—and the few lingering remnants of the prize ring are “brutal ruffians,” and their fewer patrons “knaves or idiots.”

But what on earth has all this to do with our National Defences, or with Portsmouth? Just thus much—that Portsmouth and Cherbourg are, for the nonce, our two fighting men—standing frowning at each other across those eighty miles of Channel that intervene, and ready on small provocation to be foul of one another with something harder, heavier, and infinitely more damaging than the heaviest human fist that ever shot straight out from shoulder. The parallel holds good throughout; both on the French side and our own, there is the same extravagant excitement, the same cracking up, the same wagering, and the same earnest entreaty that no expense should be spared. Even in days when the late Duke of Wellington complained that he could not get £1000 from Parliament for experiments on which we now think nothing of spending £10,000 at a time, Portsmouth could always manage to smuggle a snug little sum through for itself to be expended in strengthening its defences.

The fact is, there is not only a general feeling—a little undefined, perhaps, but none the weaker for that—that the place is of immense national importance; but there is, moreover, and this especially of late years, a feeling of uneasy jealousy directed across the Channel, and a sort of tacit resolution not to allow one man to lose a chance of asserting his superiority over the other. So it has happened that the defences of Portsmouth have been the work of succeeding ages, expanding with the exigencies, intelligence, and the apprehensions of the day, and exhibiting rather an accumulation of successive distinct devices conceived pro re natâ, than, as Cherbourg—a large and comprehensive scheme, imagined and carried out on one uniform plan.

The recognition of the great national importance of the position of Portsmouth Harbour has been so general, and it has received so much discussion and illustration in the course of the last two or three years, at the hands of essayists and journalists of all sorts and classes, that everybody must be tolerably familiar with those peculiarities of its position from which its importance is derived; it is nevertheless necessary to a due comprehension of the enlarged system of defence now in progress of construction, that the salient points of the position should be briefly recalled.

Looking at a map of the south coast of England, it is easy to conceive a time when the Isle of Wight formed a promontory jutting out from the main land, between Alban’s Head and Selsea Bill. If some enormous Saurian of the very elder times, had, in a fit of extreme rage, or uncontrollable hunger, taken a bite at such a promontory; and, not liking the morsel, had returned it a few miles from the spot whence he had taken his bite, the result one can imagine being precisely the appearance which the Isle of Wight and the opposite shore mutually present. By the way, there are one or two such “bites,” on a smaller scale in ranges of English and Irish mountains, though these are generally assigned to an ancient reptile, whose portraiture belongs rather to the imagination of monks, than the researches of science. At the bottom of our “bite,” lies the deep gulf known as Southampton Water, and between it and Selsea Bill, a system of bays, peninsulas, and islands, which cut up and intersect the whole of the dead level of which that piece of country consists. The easternmost of these is Chichester Harbour, the next Langston Harbour; both are exceedingly, and we believe increasingly, shallow, and at dead low water present nothing but hundreds of acres of mud with some lazy oozy channels winding in and out in the middle. Between the mouth of Langston Harbour, however, and Southampton Water, the coast, after advancing rather prominently into the sea southward, both from east and west, recedes somewhat suddenly into a deep bay, at the bottom of which is the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour, very narrow (about 220 yards), and very deep (ten fathoms, or sixty feet at low water). The harbour gradually widens for about a mile and a half northward, with ample water for the largest line-of-battle ships, and then suddenly expands into a considerable inland lake, some five miles each way in its greatest dimensions, presenting at high