Ancient Weymouth did not present, like the present one, an irreproachable rectangular quay, with an inn and a statue in honour of George III.  This resulted from the fact that George III. had not yet been born.  For the same reason they had not yet designed on the slope of the green hill towards the east, fashioned flat on the soil by cutting away the turf and leaving the bare chalk to the view, the white horse, an acre long, bearing the king upon his back, and always turning, in honour of George III., his tail to the city.  These honours, however, were deserved.  George III., having lost in his old age the intellect he had never possessed in his youth, was not responsible for the calamities of his reign.  He was an innocent.  Why not erect statues to him?

Weymouth, a hundred and eighty years ago, was about as symmetrical as a game of spillikins in confusion.  In legends it is said that Astaroth travelled over the world, carrying on her back a wallet which contained everything, even good women in their houses.  A pell-mell of sheds thrown from her devil’s bag would give an idea of that irregular Weymouth—­the good women in the sheds included.  The Music Hall remains as a specimen of those buildings.  A confusion of wooden dens, carved and eaten by worms (which carve in another fashion)—­shapeless, overhanging buildings, some with pillars, leaning one against the other for support against the sea wind, and leaving between them awkward spaces of narrow and winding channels, lanes, and passages, often flooded by the equinoctial tides; a heap of old grandmother houses, crowded round a grandfather church—­such was Weymouth; a sort of old Norman village thrown up on the coast of England.

The traveller who entered the tavern, now replaced by the hotel, instead of paying royally his twenty-five francs for a fried sole and a bottle of wine, had to suffer the humiliation of eating a pennyworth of soup made of fish—­which soup, by-the-bye, was very good.  Wretched fare!

The deserted child, carrying the foundling, passed through the first street, then the second, then the third.  He raised his eyes, seeking in the higher stories and in the roofs a lighted window-pane; but all were closed and dark.  At intervals he knocked at the doors.  No one answered.  Nothing makes the heart so like a stone as being warm between sheets.  The noise and the shaking had at length awakened the infant.  He knew this because he felt her suck his cheek.  She did not cry, believing him her mother.

He was about to turn and wander long, perhaps, in the intersections of the Scrambridge lanes, where there were then more cultivated plots than dwellings, more thorn hedges than houses; but fortunately he struck into a passage which exists to this day near Trinity schools.  This passage led him to a water-brink, where there was a roughly built quay with a parapet, and to the right he made out a bridge.  It was the bridge over the Wey, connecting Weymouth with Melcombe Regis, and under the arches of which the Backwater joins the harbour.