have represented Weymouth in parliament.
In the times of the troubles, John Strangeways,
a noble ancestor of the Earls of Ilchester,
was the member; and, after the Restoration,
Sir William Penn, father of the
William Penn of history. In days more
recent, Sir Christopher Wren and Sir James
Thornhill, the architect and the painter of
St. Paul's, both sat for the borough; Sir
Christopher taking his seat when over seventy
years of age. About a hundred years ago,
Bubb Dodington was jobbing votes there in
good earnest, as the following extracts from
his Diary may show:

"1752, May 5.—Saw Mr. Pelham; began by telling
him of the application I had received, &c. I assured
him that the interest of Weymouth was wholly in me
and Mr. Tucker, &c.; and for this I desired no rank
that could justly create envy in my equals, or suspicion
in my superiors.

"1754, April 14, 15, 16.—Spent in the infamous
and disagreeable compliance with the low habits of
venal wretches."

And not long before his time, one John
Ward, of Hackney, M.P. for Weymouth, had
been expelled the House for forgery, and had
stood in the pillory. At the death of this
conscientious senator, there was found among
his papers, in his own handwriting, a characteristic
prayer, thus beginning:

O Lord, thou knowest that I have nine houses in
the city of London; and that I have lately purchased
an estate in fee simple in the county of Essex. I
beseech thee to preserve the two counties of Middlesex
and Essex from fire and earthquake; and as I have a
mortgage in Hertfordshire, I beg of thee to have an eye
of compassion also on that county; and for the rest of
the counties, thou mayest deal with them as thou art
pleased. Give a prosperous voyage to the Mermaid
sloop, because I have not insured it. Enable the bank
to answer all their bills.

And so on.

The increase, lately, in our population,
has been very great. It is just nineteen
years since the rector buried an old man
of ninety, who was said, at his birth, to
have made the thousandth living Portlander.
When the Act was passed, ten years
ago, for the formation of the Breakwater, the
population had only doubled itself in the
hundred years; there were then two thousand
people in Portland. There are now six
thousand; the ten years having trebled it.
Yet the insular mind seems to remain in its
old condition, and to run in the same traditional
grooves.

A great deal is to be said about the Chesil
Bank; and a great deal has been ably said
of it by the engineer-in-chief of the Breakwater
Works, Mr. John Coode. For what
we have now to say we are indebted to a
valuable pamphlet issued by that gentleman.

The Chesil Bank, or Pebble Bank—
Chesil is Saxon for pebble—is a vast ridge of
shingle, in the form of a narrow isthmus,
lying upon the western sea-board of Dorsetshire,
between Abbotsbury and Portland.
Starting from Abbotsbury Castle, the Bank
skirts along the margin of the meadows for
half a mile, where it meets the Fleet, a
shallow estuary between a quarter of a mile
and half-a-mile in width: it then runs parallel
to the mainland as far as Wyke, a distance of
eight miles: and thence pursues a more
southerly course of two and three-quarter
miles further, to Portland, where it becomes
an ordinary beach. The shingle is composed,
chiefly, of chalk flints, with a sprinkling of
red sandstone pebbles. We may pick up
now and then a jasper pebble, of flesh-coloured
red: these are like Devon limestones,
and have often been mistaken for them.
There is, however, no calcareous matter in
them. Still more rarely, we may see green
and red porphyritic pebbles: enough, however,
to show that they do not come there
by accident. A Portland fisherman will assure
us that, land him where we please upon
the Bank, in a pitch-dark night, he will know
his whereabout by the size of the pebbles.
This is absolutely true within certain limits,
if the observation be confined to the small
shingle which is found immediately upon the
crest. The gradation in size is very regular
at that level, though variable lower down.

Whence come the pebbles? And, when
found, what force is at work to transport
them from point to point, and to plant them
thus in the form of this high mound? First,
it is clear that Portland cannot raise the
shingle. There are no pebbles whatever on
its west-side, excepting an accumulation, entirely
oolitic, from the waste of the strata
above, and from the rubble and quarry waste,
thrown over the cliff. From the main land
near Wyke, keeping along the coast as far as
Lyme Regis, we find no chalk flints. It is
manifest that none of these oolitic beds
would supply any materials corresponding to
the shingle on the bank. Westward of Lyme
there comes a change. Indications of chalk
with numerous flints begin at that point;
and, between Lyme and Sidmouth, the cliffs
yield a large quantity of flints. Again,
between Sidmouth and Budleigh Salterton,
the dull red and blotched pebbles of new
red sandstone nearly cover the beach; and
on this very beach the jasper pebbles are
found, brought down by the river Otter
from Aylesbere Hill, about six miles north;
to which point they have been laboriously
traced. It may then be determined, that the
chalk formation between Lyme and Sidmouth
is the source from which come the
chalk-flints, the chief bulk, that is to say, of
the Chesil Bank. Westward of Sidmouth
the flints end: but the sandstone and jasper
pebbles, which form an appreciable item in
the component parts of the Bank, prevail
down to Budleigh Salterton.

Everywhere the shingle of the bank
terminates suddenly, at a given depth of
water. The depth varies with the degree