IT was somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century, contemporaneously with the general rise of seaside resorts, that the invigorating air of Cromer first began to attract attention, and so early as 1806 an anonymous visitor, seeking health here, published _Cromer: a Descriptive Poem_, a wearisome production of several hundred lines, in blank—very blank—verse. The reader shall be spared his rhapsodies on the sea, but his circuitous description of a taxed cart, typical of his literary method, is not without its unconscious humour:— Quiet the steady _Sociable_ proceeds, No danger in its course, and in the rear The humbler vehicle, that bears displayed, In letters legible to ev’ry eye, The stamp of fiscal avarice. If brevity be, indeed, the soul of wit, how witless this laboured effort! If our poet could but return and his poem were to do again, he would have to wrestle with very changed conditions, and would probably give us something like this:— Noisy, th’ effluvious motor-car appears, Throbbing and shaking like a jelly: Smelling to Heaven in pestiferous clouds Of ill-combusted petrol, blue and beastly. Danger in its course of twenty miles An hour, and in the rear a frightened horse And battered trap. Wrecking the shops, Frightening the old ladies, upsetting the Bath chairs, Crumpling up the casual cyclist, And, generally, playing the very deuce With everything, it goes. Its licence plates Boldly inscribed, designed by law to be Legible to ev’ry eye, artfully obscured With wraps and rugs. Give me my gun. And so forth. There is room for lengthy eloquence on the subject. Cromer has in these later years become the Motor Cad’s Paradise. Here are the gorgeous “hotels” beloved of his little soul, and here the good roads he can render dangerous to others with little risk to himself. A wide gulf separates the Cromer of that poet’s time and ours, but the change that has taken place is quite recent, and astonishingly sudden. At the close of Georgian days a certain vogue had been established, and a Bath House was built under the cliff. This was washed away during the storm and high tide in 1836, but the “Bath Hotel” of that period, stuccoed, white-painted, midway between cliff-top and sea, remains, together with a few of the early Victorian bay-windowed seaside lodging-houses, small but comfortable, that line the narrow streets near the cliffs’ edge. It was following this great storm of 1836 that the first of Cromer’s defensive sea-walls was built; but the greater storm of 1845 wrecked it and washed away the timber jetty, built in 1822, at a cost of £1,400. What Cromer was like at this period may be judged from the illustration, which clearly shows how, from the picturesque point of view, it has been spoiled.