as been engaged in an unceasing war with
France,--not, indeed, with swords and bayonets, but as really with her
workshops and dockyards. She has tasked these to their uttermost to
maintain and increase her naval superiority. And this is not the only
evidence we have of her true feeling. The building of new fortifications
for her ports, and the enlargement and strengthening of the old
defences, all tell the same story of profound distrust. "Plymouth has
been made secure. The mouth of the Thames is thought to be impregnable."
That is the way English papers write. Around Portsmouth and Gosport she
has thrown an immense girdle of forts. We may think what we will of
Cherbourg, England views it in the light of a perpetual menace. To the
proud challenge she has sent back a sturdy defiance. Right opposite to
it, on her nearest shore, she has reared a "Gibraltar of the Channel."
If you take your map, you will perceive, facing Cherbourg, and
projecting from the southern coast of England, the little island of
Portland, which at low tide becomes a peninsula, and is connected with
the main land by Chesil Bank, a low ridge of shingle ten miles long. On
the extreme north of this island, looking down into Weymouth Bay, is a
little cluster of rocky hills, rising sharply to a considerable height,
and occupying, perhaps, a space of sixty acres. This is where the
fortress, or Veme, as it is called, is built. On the northern side, the
cliff lifts itself up from the waters of the bay almost in a
perpendicular line, and is absolutely inaccessible. On all other sides
the Veme has been isolated by a tremendous chasm, which makes the dry
ditch of the fort. This chasm has been blasted into the solid rock, and
is nowhere less than a hundred feet wide and eighty feet deep. At the
angles of the fortress it widens to two hundred feet, and sinks beneath
the batteries in a sheer perpendicular of one hundred and thirty feet.
Two bastions jut from the main work into it, protecting it from approach
by a terrible cross-fire. All the appointments are upon the same scale.
The magazines, the storehouses, the water-tanks, are built to furnish
supplies for a siege, not of months, but of years. On every side the
rocky surface of the hills has been shaved down below the level of its
guns; so that there is not a spot seaward or landward that may not be
swept by its tremendous batteries. Such is this remarkable stronghold
which is rising to completion opposite Cherbo