Bie PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 
solidity of the fabric. The elements took him at his word, for 
while on a visit of inspection to his lighthouse the dreadful 
storm of November 26, 1703, arose, the only storm whicb in 
our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropical hurricane. 
“No other tempest,” says Macaulay in his Essay on Addison, 
“was ever in this country the occasion of a Parliamentary 
address or of a public fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. 
Large mansions had been blown down. One Prelate had been 
buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and Bristol had 
presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of 
families were still in mourning. The prostrate trunks of large 
trees and the ruins of houses still attested in all the southern 
counties the fury of the blast.” No wonder that a tempest 
like this swept away the ill-constructed lighthouse like the 
‘‘unsubstantial fabric of a vision,” and that neither poor Mr. 
Winstanley nor any of his companions survived to recount the 
terrors of that dreadful night. 
Strange to say, the task of rebuilding the Eddystone light- 
house, which was now felt as a national necessity, once more 
devolved, not upon a professed architect, but upon a Mr. 
Rudyerd, a linendraper of Ludgate Hill, the son of a Cornish 
vagrant, who had raised himself by his talents and industry frem 
rags and mendicancy to a station of honourable competence. 
The cheice, however, was not ill made, for, with the assistance of 
two competent shipwrights, the London tradesman constructed 
an edifice which, though mainly of timber, was so firmly bolted 
to the rock with iron branches that for nearly half a century it 
resisted the fury of the billows, and might have withstood them 
for many a year to come had it not been rapidly and completely 
destroyed by fire. This catastrophe, which happened on 
December 2, 1755, was marked by a strange accident, for while 
one of the light-keepers was engaged in throwing up water 
four yards higher than himself, a quantity of lead, dissolved 
by the heat of the flames, suddenly rushed like a torrent from 
the roof, and falling upon his head, face, and shoulders, 
burnt him in a dreadful manner. Having been conveyed 
to the hospital at Plymouth, he invariably told the surgeon 
who attended him, that he had swallowed part of the lead 
while looking upward; the reality of the assertion seemed 
quite incredible, for who could suppose it possible that any 
