However, ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’: the enthusiast and the mad speculator were often in evidence in the days of good Queen Bess. Those days of leaping and bounding prosperity that England then saw, as she followed new paths to fortune, encouraged such beings, and amongst them was one who came to court with a project to build a lighthouse on the Goodwins. The projector was Gawen Smith; his proposals did not begin with this of which we have spoken. He had been an applicant for office before; a vacancy had happened in ‘Her Majestie’s bande,’ one of the drummers having been gathered to his fathers, and Gawen considered he was just the man for the post, for he could ‘sounde on the drumme’ all manner of ‘marches, daunces and songys.’ Had it been the post of chief-engineer for draining the Lincolnshire fens, our friend would, no doubt, have been able to make out a good case for his own fitness for the appointment. Poor man! his application for the band vacancy was never answered, so far as we know; perhaps Secretary Cecil thought him a better sounder of his own trumpet than beater of her majesty’s drums! But he was not daunted by failure to get an answer: in due course came the application which has made him of interest to the reader of these pages—the suggestion for a lighthouse on the Goodwins. He tells Cecil that he has been ‘down upon the Goodwin Sands,’ in sundry parts of them, and though he found the place ‘very dangerous,’ yet by the May following he would be ready, if permitted, and if the queen would grant him the leave to gather toll—to build a beacon, ‘fyrme and staide uppon the foresaid Godwyne Sande,’ twenty or thirty feet above the high-water level; which beacon should, by night, ‘shewe his fyre’ for twenty or thirty miles, and be seen by day for hard on twenty miles. It was no ordinary lighthouse that Gawen was going to build there. Should there—despite this wonderful erection—happen a wreck upon the sands, the beacon-tower would be an abiding-place for the shipwrecked, as it would furnish room for forty persons above the highest point to which the waves had been ever known to reach. He had one other request, and when compared with the vastness of the undertaking, it was a modest one; it was that the queen would give him £1,000 when he should deliver to her hand ‘grasse, herbe, or flower,’ grown upon this desolate, shifting mass of sand, and £2,000 when the soil should be so firm that his tower would bear the weight of cannon for the defence of the channel! Cecil carefully folded up the application and endorsed it: ‘The demands of Gawen Smith touchinge the placing of a beacon on the Goodwyn Sandes’; and there the matter ended.