Editing Protected cruiser (section)

===Elswick's influence===

Following the ''Leander'' class, the next small cruisers designed for the Royal Navy were the {{sclass|Mersey|cruiser|4}} of 1883. Derived from the previous class, these were also protected cruisers but with a full-length armoured deck for superior protection. The ''Merseys'' were born from a different tactical conception to their forebears and this was reflected in their armament arrangement. They were conceived as 'fleet torpedo cruisers' to carry out attacks on the enemy battle line and featured heavy guns fore and aft with excellent fields of fire. Despite public Admiralty criticism of Elswick designs, it is clear that the ''Mersey'' class was heavily influenced by the Italian 'torpedo ram cruiser' ''Giovanni Bausan'', a design itself derived from ''Esmeralda''. Thus, the British notion of the protected cruising warship was being shaped early on by the commercial export models coming out of Elswick. (For the following decade, practically any British cruiser which was seen to have eschewed very heavy firepower in favour of conservative design balance was subject to fierce public criticism, and this period coincided somewhat unfortunately with Sir William White's tenure as DNC.)

The protected cruiser remained a popular and economical type, rather stable in terms of its characteristics, right throughout the 1890s and into the early 1900s. During this period, protected cruiser designs of second- to third-class grew slowly in size, seeing few major changes to the common balance of design features. Perhaps the most significant paradigm shift came with the universal adoption of quick-firing guns by the world's navies in the middle of the 1890s; suddenly small and medium cruisers saw a swift increase in their fighting power for a slight reduction in gun calibre, yielding a very economical balance of attributes. This kept the protected cruiser competitive for a further decade.