“I had baited my horse,” he writes, “at New Romney, and was coming jogging along very soberly, now looking at the sea, then looking at the cattle, then the corn, when my eye, in swinging round, lighted upon a great round building, standing upon the beach. I had scarcely had time to think about what it could be, when twenty or thirty others, standing along the coast, caught my eye; and, if any one had been behind me, he might have heard me exclaim, in a voice that made my horse bound, ‘The _martello towers_, by ----!’ Oh, Lord! To think that I should be destined to behold these monuments of the wisdom of Pitt and Dundas and Perceval! Good G--! Here they are, piles of bricks in a circular form about three hundred feet (_guess_) circumference at the base, and about one hundred and fifty feet circumference at the top. There is a doorway, about midway up, in each, and each has two windows. Cannons were to be fired from the top of these things, in order to defend the country against the French Jacobins! “I think I have counted along here upwards of thirty of these ridiculous things, which, I daresay, cost five, perhaps ten, thousand pounds each; and one of which was, I am told, _sold_ on the coast of Sussex, the other day, for two hundred pounds! There is, they say, a chain of these things all the way to Hastings! I daresay they cost millions. But far indeed are these from being all, or half, or a quarter of the squanderings along here. Hythe is half _barracks_; the hills are covered with barracks, and barracks most expensive, most squandering, fill up the side of the hill. Here is a canal (I crossed it at Appledore) made for the length of thirty miles (from Hythe, in Kent, to Rye, in Sussex) to _keep out the French_; for, those armies who had so often crossed the Rhine and the Danube were to be kept back by a canal made by Pitt, thirty feet wide, at the most! All along the coast there are works of some sort or other, incessant sinks of money; walls of immense dimensions; masses of stone brought and put into piles. Then you see some of the walls and buildings falling down; some that have never been finished. The whole thing taken together,” he concludes, “looks as if a spell had been, all of a sudden, set upon the workmen; or, in the words of the Scripture, here is the ‘_desolation of abomination, standing in high places_.’”