BOOK III. _LIGHTHOUSES OF GREAT BRITAIN._ CHAPTER I. THE STORY OF THE EDDYSTONE: A.D. 1696, 1706, 1759. The first lighthouse of a regular character erected on the shores of England seems to have been that of Lowestoft, in 1609. Among its successors we may refer to those of Hunstanton Point, 1665, and of the Scilly Islands, 1680. To the same epoch belong the lighthouses of Dungeness, Orfordness, and the Eddystone; the latter being the most important, the most remarkable, and the most interesting, as, I think, the following brief narrative will not fail to show. * * * * * The _Eddystone_ is the name of the highest summit of a reef of rocks which lie in deep water about fourteen miles to the south-west of Plymouth harbour. As they are in a line with Lizard Head, in Cornwall, and Start Point, in Devonshire, they are not only in the track of vessels bound for the great Devonian seaport, but of vessels coasting up and down the English Channel. At high water they are barely visible, and their position could only be told by the waves which _eddy_ and seethe above them; at low water several low, broken, and dismal-looking ridges of gneiss become conspicuous. When the wind blows from the south-west, they are the centre of “a hell of waters,” and no ship involved in the vortex could hope to escape destruction. It may readily be conceived that so perilous a reef, when unprotected by any beacon, was a source of deep alarm to the mariner, who, to give it the widest possible berth, was accustomed to enter the Channel in a much more southerly latitude than is now done. But in avoiding Scylla he often fell into Charybdis, and hence the numerous wrecks which occurred on the French coast, and more particularly upon the dangerous rocks surrounding the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney. The erection of a lighthouse upon the Eddystone was, therefore, a matter of national concern; yet no one could be found to undertake a task whose accomplishment nature seemed to have rendered impossible, until Henry Winstanley, a country gentleman of Littleberry, in Essex, chivalrously came forward in the year 1696, and having obtained the necessary legal powers, proceeded to carry his design into execution. This same Winstanley was one of those eccentric geniuses who find a pleasure in mystifying their friends, and in investing their daily life with an air of legerdemain. He adapted science to practical jokes with an ingenuity which, we think, has never been surpassed. If a guest in his bedroom kicked an old slipper out of his way, immediately a ghost started from the floor. If, in another, he threw himself into a chair, it suddenly flung out its two arms, and held him fast as a prisoner. Or if in the garden he retired into an arbour, and rested on a particular seat, he was straightway set afloat in the middle of the adjoining canal.