Oddly enough, we do not hear of any early lighthouse at Yarmouth. In the official catalogue of lights on the Norfolk coast the date of the first lighthouse of the Yarmouth group is that at Gorleston, said to have been established in the ‘fifties.’ But there was a lighthouse here nearly two centuries before; and Molloy, in his treatise on sea-law, in 1676, refers to the ‘great and pious care’ by King Charles II in erecting a lighthouse at Gorleston, or ‘Goldston,’ as he spells it, ‘at his own princely charge,’ from which expression we are, I suppose to imagine that his Majesty kept up a lighthouse at his own expense: the thing seems improbable and requires confirmation before we can accept it as truth. Lighthouses in the neighbourhood at St. Nicholas Gatt were proposed and for a time established by Sir John Clayton between 1675 and 1678, and we find the seamen of Yarmouth still clamouring for them in 1692. In the seamen’s petition the loss to shipping, for want of them, is very clearly set forth; one petition says that as many as two hundred ships perished on the sandbanks there during the gale on one winter’s night. A lightship now marks the dangers of Corton sands, some few miles further south of Yarmouth than St. Nicholas Gatt. But Corton was one of the places at which Sir John Clayton proposed to erect a lighthouse long before. When the Trinity House had crushed all his other lighthouse projects he offered the corporation something handsome to approve of a light at Corton only, but it would not: multiplicity of lights, it said, confused the navigator, and its own lighthouse at Lowestoft did all that was needed. At Lowestoft, in 1778, were made the earliest experiments with reflectors; a thousand tiny mirrors were placed in the lantern, and with such success that the flame of the oil lamp appeared at sea, some four leagues off, like a huge globe of fire. The lighthouse at Harwich is memorable for quite a different reason. It played—or rather was intended to play—an important part in English politics. When at the eleventh hour James II and his advisers were trying might and main to ward off the Dutchman’s coming, and when the Trinity House officials, acting under Pepys’ orders, were busily engaged in removing buoys and altering the position of familiar coast marks, the small, or lower, lighthouse at Harwich was an object of consideration. It was—so went forth the order—to be ‘removed’ and set up in another place.’ But how? The operation could not be _rapidly_ performed, for the building was a solid bit of masonry, and all depended on haste. A happy idea at last struck some one: the Dutch ships would be as easily misled by an erection of canvas, and that, ‘with the utmost secrecy,’ could be stretched on a timber frame, carried to the place appointed, and set up in less than an hour, whilst a charge or so of gunpowder would at the same time level the real lighthouse.