Weymouth’s return for all these favours is still to be seen, in the bronze group erected by the townsfolk in 1809, to celebrate the generally joyful occasion of his Jubilee, to perpetuate the especial gratitude of the people for favours received, and in hopes of more to come.
Weymouth very closely reflects the prosperity of that great era, in the Georgian streets, the quaintly bowed windows of private houses and the now old-world shop-fronts, many of them exquisite examples of the restrained taste and aptitude for just proportion in design characteristic of that age, and only now beginning to be appreciated at their true worth. It was the age of the Adams brothers, of Chippendale and Sheraton; an age rightly come to be regarded in our time as classic in all things in the domain of architecture and decoration. In its unaltered purlieus Weymouth is thus singularly like the older parts of Brighton, but now richer in vestiges of the Georgian period than the larger and more changeful town.
That, doubtless, was a period of inflated prices in Weymouth. King, queen, and princesses, fashionables and many soldiers sent up the ideas of tradesfolk just as the sun expands the mercury of a thermometer. Uncle Benjy, in _The Trumpet Major_, found Budmouth a place where money flew away doubly as quick as it did when the famous Scot visited London and “hadna’ been there a day when bang went saxpence.” At Budmouth in the time of Farmer George, it was a “shilling for this and a shilling for that; if you only eat one egg or even a poor windfall of an apple, you’ve got to pay; and a bunch o’ radishes is a halfpenny, and a quart o’ cider a good tuppence three-farthings at lowest reckoning. Nothing without paying!” Ay! but if prices were no higher than these, ’twas no such ruinous place, after all. Poor Uncle Benjy!
The most striking differences in physical geography between the constituent parts of Weymouth are that Melcombe Regis, here on the shore is flat as a pancake, and Weymouth, there on t’other side of the harbour, is as hilly as a house-roof. You could have no greater dissimilarity than that between the prudish formality which stands for the Melcombe front and the heaped-up terraces of houses of every description at Weymouth, which has no front at all; unless indeed the lowest tier of houses skirting the harbour and its quays, and looking into the back alleys and quays of Melcombe may so be styled. In those old days, to which Weymouth dates back, no seaside town could afford so assailable a luxury as a “front,” and the older quarters of nearly all such are generally found, as here, folded away under the lee of a bluff, or thinly lining the shores of an estuarial harbour. Here the Nothe Point, with its fort mounted with heavy guns, is the rocky bluff behind which the old town cowered from elemental and human foes, and that estuary, both by reason of its narrow entrance, and those great forts of the Nothe and Portland, has never been one sought by an enemy’s ship.