Queen and three daughters came in 1789.  An amusing account of the royal visit is given by Fanny Burney.  The King was so pleased with the place that he stayed eleven weeks, and by his unaffected buorgeois manner and approachableness quickly gained the enthusiastic loyalty of his Dorset subjects.  Miss Burney’s most entertaining reminiscence of the visit is the oft-repeated account of the King’s first dip in the sea.  Immediately the royal person “became immersed beneath the waves” a band, concealed in a bathing machine struck up “God save Great George our King.”  Weymouth is in possession of a keepsake of these stirring times in the statue of His Hanoverian Majesty that graces(?) the centre of the Esplanade.  It is to be hoped that the town will never be inveigled into scrapping this memorial, which for quaintness and unconscious humour is almost unsurpassed.  A subject of derisive merriment to the tripper and of shuddering aversion for those with any aesthetic sense, it is nevertheless an interesting link with another age and is not very much worse than some other specimens of the memorial type of a more recent date.  It has lately received a coat of paint of an intense black and the cross-headed wand that the monarch holds is tipped with gold.  The contrast with the enormous expanse of white base, out of all proportion to the little black figure of the King, is strangely startling.

Not much can be said for St. Mary’s, an eighteenth-century church in St. Mary’s Street which carries the Bloomsbury-by-Sea idea to excess.  The church has a tablet, the epitaph upon which seems quite unique in the contradictory character it gives to the deceased: 

  UNDETH LIES YE BODY OF
  CHRISR.  BROOKS ESQ.  OF JAMAICA
  WHO DEPARD.  THIS LIFE 4 SEPR. 1769
  AGED 38 YEARS, ONE OF YE WORST OF MEN
  FRIEND TO YE DISTRESD. 
  TRULY AFFECTD & KIND HUSBAND
  TENDER PART. & A SINCR.  FRIEND

The artist was unfortunate in his choice of abbreviations and strangers are sometimes sorely puzzled; some, indeed, never guess that “worst” has any connexion with “worthiest.”  The altar piece, difficult to see on a dull day, was painted by Sir James Thornhill, a former representative of the borough in Parliament.  Sir Christopher Wren was also for a time member for Weymouth, and portraits of both, together with the Duke of Wellington and George III, adorn the Guildhall, a good building at the west end of St. Mary’s Street.  The twin towns were unique in their choice of members; in addition to the great architect and famous painter, a poet—­Richard Glover, author of Leonidas—­of no mean repute in his own day, was chosen and the original Winston Churchill, father of the great Duke of Marlborough, also sat for Weymouth.

[Illustration:  OLD WEYMOUTH.]

Within the Guildhall is to be seen a chest from the captured Armada galleon and an old chair from Melcombe Friary, of which some poor remnants existed in Maiden Street almost within living memory.  On the other side of the harbour is Holy Trinity Church, built in 1836.  This has another fine altar painting of the Crucifixion, thought by some authorities to be by Vandyck.