Winstanley was very proud of his work, and so convinced, it is said, of its thorough stability, that he frequently expressed a wish to be under its roof in the fiercest hurricane that ever blew beneath the face of heaven, assured that it would not shake one joist or beam. Heaven sometimes takes the presumptuous at their word! Winstanley, with his workmen and light-keepers, had fixed his residence in the tower, when a tremendous storm arose, which, on the 26th of November, 1702, blew a hurricane of unprecedented violence. The sea rolled its billows heavily, and the wind raged, and masses of cloud darkened the horizon, and all Nature seemed convulsed by the elemental strife. When the dawn broke, the people of Plymouth hastened to the beach, and turned their anxious gaze towards the Eddystone. The waters swirled and seethed around and about the rock; but where was the lighthouse, the fantastic structure raised by the ready brain and daring soul of Winstanley? During the night it had been swept away, and not a memorial remained of its ill-fated occupants. The melancholy incident forms the theme of a striking ballad by Jean Ingelow, which concludes in the following manner:-- "And it fell out, fell out at last, That he would put to sea, To scan once more his lighthouse-tower On the rock o' destiny. "And the winds woke, and the storm broke, And wrecks came plunging in; None in the town that night lay down Or sleep or rest to win. "The great mad waves were rolling graves, And each flung up its dead; The seething flow was white below, And black the sky o'erhead. "And when the dawn, the dull gray dawn, Broke on the trembling town, And men looked south to the harbour mouth, The lighthouse-tower was down! "Down in the deep where he doth sleep Who made it shine afar, And then in the night that drowned its light, Set, with his pilot star." [Sidenote: John Rudyerd.] The usefulness of a beacon on the Eddystone Rock had been so abundantly proved that it was not long before an attempt was made to replace Winstanley's unfortunate structure. A Captain Lovet obtained a ninety-nine years' lease of the rock from the Trinity House Corporation, and engaged as his architect a silk-mercer on Ludgate Hill, named John Rudyerd. The reasons that led him to make so curious a choice are unknown, but the event proved that it was a sensible one. Rudyerd designed a graceful and even elegant building, choosing a circle for the outline, and studying the greatest simplicity, so as to offer the least possible resistance to wind and wave.