The story of the present structure at the Eddystone has been told with quaint simplicity by the man who raised it. Smeaton had this advantage over Whiteside, that he had precursors in his work: but then the work was harder, and was done more enduringly. Whiteside’s work at the Smalls is coming away in the course of a season or two; Smeaton’s, at the Eddystone, is to remain the pattern lighthouse of the world for ever. The first Eddystone, built in 1696, was a strange affair--something like a Chinese pagoda, or a belvedere in some suburban tea-gardens, with open galleries and projecting cranes. The architect was Henry Winstanley, and he has depicted himself complacently fishing out of his kitchen window; but how he ever expected his queer mansion to stand the winter storms is simply a marvel. It was completed in 1699, and it was destroyed in 1703. The necessity for repairs had taken him to the rock at the time, a dreadful storm set in on the 26th November, and the next morning there was nothing left of the lighthouse or its occupants but some of the large irons whereby the work had been fixed in the rock. A narrative of the occurrence, printed in the following year, states:--“It was very remarkable that, as we are informed, at the same time the lighthouse abovesaid was blown down, the model of it, in Mr. Winstanley’s house at Littlebury, in Essex, above 200 miles from the lighthouse, fell down and was broke to pieces.” Upon which, Smeaton shrewdly remarks: “This, however, may not appear extraordinary, if we consider, that the same general wind that blew down the lighthouse near Plymouth might blow down the model at Littlebury.” The next structure at the Eddystone, commenced in 1706, was a very different thing. Mr. John Rudyerd was doomed by fortune to be a silk mercer, and keep a shop on Ludgate Hill; but Nature had made him an engineer. Smeaton speaks with great admiration of many of his arrangements; and if the lighthouse had not been destroyed by fire, about forty-six years after its erection, there appears no reason why it should not have been standing to this day. While Winstanley’s was all external ornament, with numberless nooks and angles for the wind and sea to gripe it by, Rudyerd’s was a snug, smooth, solid cone, round which the sea might rage, but on which it could hardly fasten. But fire conquered what the water could not. Luckily for the keepers, it broke out in the very top of the lantern, and burnt downwards, and there was time to save the men, although one of them, looking upwards at the burning mass, not only got burnt on the shoulders and head with some molten lead, but while gazing upwards with his mouth open, received some of the liquid metal down his throat, and yet survived, to the incredulity of all Plymouth, for twelve days, when seven ounces of lead, “of a flat, oval form,” was taken from his stomach.