Weymouth’s return for all these favours is still to be seen, in the bronze group erected by the townsfolk in 1809, to celebrate the generally joyful occasion of his Jubilee, to perpetuate the especial gratitude of the people for favours received, and in hopes of more to come.
Weymouth very closely reflects the prosperity of that great era, in the Georgian streets, the quaintly bowed windows of private houses and the now old-world shop-fronts, many of them exquisite examples of the restrained taste and aptitude for just proportion in design characteristic of that age, and only now beginning to be appreciated at their true worth. It was the age of the Adams brothers, of Chippendale and Sheraton; an age rightly come to be regarded in our time as classic in all things in the domain of architecture and decoration. In its unaltered purlieus Weymouth is thus singularly like the older parts of Brighton, but now richer in vestiges of the Georgian period than the larger and more changeful town.
That, doubtless, was a period of inflated prices in Weymouth. King, queen, and princesses, fashionables and many soldiers sent up the ideas of tradesfolk just as the sun expands the mercury of a thermometer. Uncle Benjy, in The Trumpet Major, found Budmouth a place where money flew away doubly as quick as it did when the famous Scot visited London and “hadna’ been there a day when bang went saxpence.” At Budmouth in the time of Farmer George, it was a “shilling for this and a shilling for that; if you only eat one egg or even a poor windfall of an apple, you’ve got to pay; and a bunch o’ radishes is a halfpenny, and a quart o’ cider a good tuppence three-farthings at lowest reckoning. Nothing without paying!” Ay! but if prices were no higher than these, ’twas no such ruinous place, after all. Poor Uncle Benjy!
The most striking differences in physical geography between the constituent parts of Weymouth are that Melcombe Regis, here on the shore is flat as a pancake, and Weymouth, there on t’other side of the harbour, is as hilly as a house-roof. You could have no greater dissimilarity than that between the prudish formality which stands for the Melcombe front and the heaped-up terraces of houses of every description at Weymouth, which has no front at all; unless indeed the lowest tier of houses skirting the harbour and its quays, and looking into the back alleys and quays of Melcombe may so be styled. In those old days, to which Weymouth dates back, no seaside town could afford so assailable a luxury as a “front,” and the older quarters of nearly all such are generally found, as here, folded away under the lee of a bluff, or thinly lining the shores of an estuarial harbour. Here the Nothe Point, with its fort mounted with heavy guns, is the rocky bluff behind which the old town cowered from elemental and human foes, and that estuary, both by reason of its narrow entrance, and those great forts of the Nothe and Portland, has never been one sought by an enemy’s ship.
The harbour is not uninteresting: what harbour ever is? The comings and goings of ships have their own romance, and bring rumours of all kinds of outer worlds and strange peoples. You look across from the quays of Weymouth to the quays of Melcombe, and there, beside the walls and the old warehouses, lie the ships from many home and foreign ports, their names duly to be read under their counters. Whence they individually come, I do not greatly care to know. This one may only have come from the Channel Islands with a consignment of early potatoes: and, on the other hand, it may have won home again after who knows what romantic doings at the Equator or within the Arctic Zone. It may have brought treasure-trove, or on the other hand be merely carrying ordinary commercial freights, at so low a figure that the owners are dissatisfied and the skipper gloomy. It is well, you see, to leave a little margin for fancy when the good ship has come to port once more and within sight and the easiest reach of those two great features of a Christian and a civilised land: the Church and the Public House.
In these days the town is recovering at last from the undeserved neglect into which it fell after the illness and death of George III. and from later disasters and indifferences; and, what with improved railway travelling, and the added interest it obtains from being selected as the site of a new great national harbour where more than ever the ships of the Navy will come and go, has a great future before it.
CHAPTER XXI
THE ISLE OF PORTLAND
To the generality of untravelled folk, Portland is nothing but a quarry and a prison. It is both and more. It is, for one additional thing, a fortress, in these times grown to a considerable strength, and, for another, is a singular outlying corner of England tethered to the mainland only by that seemingly precarious stretch of pebbles, the Chesil Beach. As Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of The Trumpet Major, so Portland, the “Isle of Slingers,” as Mr. Hardy calls it, is especially, though not with absolute exclusiveness, the district of The Well Beloved.