45 
here surely take the altitude of the inhabitants, and lose not an 
inch between the head and the ceiling. . . But as lodgings are 
low, they are cheap.” He could get practically a furnished house 
for 5s. a week. ‘ The coast,’ the Rector added, “‘is safe ; the 
cannons are all covered with rust and grass ; the ships moored ; 
and no enemy apprehended. Come and see.” Here indeed was 
_ an early unsolicited testimonial to the future Queen of Watering 
Places. 
Another side of the question came later, Among the tit bits 
of information that Mr. Harrison gave of Brighthelmstone in these 
days was that the vane on the Church of St. Nicholas, always lone 
and solitary in the pictures of the period, was in the shape of a 
gilt fish, probably a dolphin. But some fifty years after the 
Rector of Buxted praised the cheapness of Brighton’s lodgings, 
the town had grown less unsophisticated, and had realised what 
it could do in the way of profiting from visitors. And Mr. 
Harrison had found this apostrophe to the vane of St. Nicholas, 
conceived by a plundered visitor to be a “‘ shark,” the emblem of 
Brighton. 
“Say why, on Brighton’s Church we see 
The golden shark display’d, 
But that ’twas aptly meant to be 
An emblem of its trade. 
Nor could the thing so well be told 
In any other way ; 
The town’s a shark that lives on gold, 
The company its prey.” 
Another interesting point made by Mr. Harrison was that in 
the eighteenth century Brighton seems to have practised a certain 
amount of socialism, —or co-operation,—for its hemp shares, fields 
for the growing of hemp between Ship-street and Black Lion- 
street, were owned in common, and the profits shared among the 
townsmen. This was that Arcadian time when the Lanes were 
really lanes between fields, and not between lines of stuffy 
tenements devoted to the second-hand trade. 
The main part of the lecture was concerned with the develop- 
ment of Brighton in the days when it began to realise its 
importance as a watering place and to cover its fields with the 
close-set houses that are the despair of landlords and property 
agents in these modern days of different ideas. Mr Harrison had 
a remarkably extensive collection of slides showing the older 
streets of Brighton in all stages of their development. He had views 
of the Steine when it was practically an open field, when, if you 
looked north, you saw the grass-clad downland of Round Hill,— 
now a prosaic aggregation of roofs and chimneys. North Street, 
East Street, West Street, were all shown, as by constant growth 
they evolved from scattered cottages to stately business thorough- 
fares, contracting to mere lanes in the improvidence of the first 
