Chapter 9

"passes to the Isle Avilion,He passes and is heal'd and cannot die."

The Britons in their heathen days had dreamed of a fairyland where death and sorrow entered not, the Celtic Tir-na-n'Og, an Island of Immortal Youth hid somewhere in the flushed, mysterious west, and the Christian faith, that came so early to Glastonbury, did not destroy but gathered to itself the wistful hope, so that the site of one of theearliest churches in England became the centre of strangely blended legends. It was in the Isle of Avalon, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the sword Excalibur was forged, and after Arthur had passed from mortal ken, he was not dead, but still, through the waiting centuries,

"Mythic Uther's deeply wounded sonIn some fair space of sloping greensLay, dozing, in the vale of Avalon,And watched by weeping queens."

Yet the mediæval voices, that we would gladly believe more simply than we may, tell us that Arthur was buried at Glastonbury in a sarcophagus hollowed out of the trunk of an oak, that the penitent Guinevere was laid at his feet, that the skeletons were uncovered and removed to the church in the reign of Henry II, and were seen by so sane a witness as Leland so late as the middle of the sixteenth century. But in King Arthur, death is life, and not his reputed grave, nor the giant bones folk wondered at, nor the golden lock of Guinevere that crumbled at a monk's too eager clutch, could shake the faith in his second coming. Malory, writingin the fifteenth century, illustrates even in his half denial the persistency of that expectation:

"Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place, and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather, I will say,—here in this world he changed his life, but many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse:Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus."

Arthurian legends are attached to other places in Somersetshire, notably to Cadbury, whose earlier name was Camelot, and to its adjacent village of Queen's Camel. Here on the river Camel cluster Arthurian names,—King Arthur's Palace, a moated mound; King Arthur's Well, a spring of magic virtues; King Arthur's Hunting Causeway, an old track across the fields; and here the tradition of a great battle lingers. But Glastonbury is not only an Arthurian shrine; it was once, in purer days than ours, the keeper of the Holy Grail.

"To whom the monk: 'The Holy Grail! ...... What is it?The phantom of a cup that comes and goes?'"'Nay, monk, what phantom?' answer'd Percivale.'The cup, the cup itself, from which our LordDrank at the last sad supper with his own.This, from the blessed land of Aromat—After the day of darkness, when the deadWent wandering o'er Moriah—the good saint,Arimathæan Joseph, journeying broughtTo Glastonbury, where the winter thornBlossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.And there awhile it bode; and if a manCould touch or see it, he was healed at once,By faith, of all his ills. But then the timesGrew to such evil that the holy cupWas caught away to Heaven, and disappear'd.'"To whom the monk: 'From our old books I knowThat Joseph came of old to Glastonbury,And there the heathen prince, Arviragus,Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build;And there he built with wattles from the marshA little lonely church.'"[9]

"To whom the monk: 'The Holy Grail! ...... What is it?The phantom of a cup that comes and goes?'

"'Nay, monk, what phantom?' answer'd Percivale.'The cup, the cup itself, from which our LordDrank at the last sad supper with his own.This, from the blessed land of Aromat—After the day of darkness, when the deadWent wandering o'er Moriah—the good saint,Arimathæan Joseph, journeying broughtTo Glastonbury, where the winter thornBlossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.And there awhile it bode; and if a manCould touch or see it, he was healed at once,By faith, of all his ills. But then the timesGrew to such evil that the holy cupWas caught away to Heaven, and disappear'd.'

"To whom the monk: 'From our old books I knowThat Joseph came of old to Glastonbury,And there the heathen prince, Arviragus,Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build;And there he built with wattles from the marshA little lonely church.'"[9]

Dreamy hours were those we spent under the shadow of Glastonbury Tor, among the tranquil ruins of that once so glorious abbey, strolling about with a motley company of sheep, chickens, and tourists over what is perhaps the most ancient consecrated ground in England. Hither came St. Joseph of Arimathæa with his eleven companions and here the staff of the saint, as he thrust it intothe ground, put forth leaf and blossom as a signal that the resting-place was reached. The little wattled oratory that the Archangel Gabriel commanded and the pagan king permitted them to build on a waste island of the marsh was succeeded, in course of time, by a primitive form of monastery, where St. Patrick, his mission to Ireland accomplished, dwelt many years and died. Here in a later century great St. Dunstan held the post of abbot and waged at his forge stern warfare against the Devil. And it is sober history that here a Christian church and brotherhood lived on in unbroken peace from British times to English. "What Glastonbury has to itself, alone and without rival," says Freeman, "is its historical position as the tie, at once national and religious, which binds the history and memories of our race to those of the race which we supplanted."

The after-story of Glastonbury is as tragic as that of Whalley. A mitred abbey, enlarged and enriched from generation to generation, it became a court whither the sons of noblemen and gentlemen were sent for nurture in gracious manners; a school of learning whose library was one of the mostprecious in the realm; a seat of princely hospitalities and lavish charities. When the storm burst, Abbot Whiting strove to hide from the spoilers some of the abbey plate. He was forthwith arrested at his manor of Sharpham—the very house where Fielding the novelist was afterwards born,—sentenced at Wells, dragged on a hurdle to the top of Glastonbury Tor, and there hanged and butchered, his head being spiked above the abbey gate. The magnificent church and extensive conventual buildings, stripped and abandoned, long served the neighbourhood as a quarry. Richly sculptured blocks were built into barns and garden-walls and even broken up for making a road over the marshes. Little is left for the gazer now save a few weed-crowned columns, an exquisite Early English chapel on the site of St. Joseph's wattled church, a gabled tithe-barn, an old pilgrim inn, and the Abbot's Kitchen, a witchcap structure whose four vast fireplaces must all have roared with jollity when Abbot Whiting chanced to be entertaining five hundred "persons of fashion" at a single dinner-party. As we wandered over the daisied pastureland fromone grey fragment to another, we realised the invisible Glastonbury all the more in the peace that has come with the perishing of the visible. "Time the Shadow" has but softened the splendour. More than ever is this

"the island-valley of Avilion;Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it liesDeep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawnsAnd bowery hollows."

It is only six miles from Glastonbury to Wells, one of the loveliest cathedral cities of England, not a place to hurry through, but to settle in and quietly enjoy. Lodgings in Vicar's Close, leisurely strolls through the gardens of the Bishop's Palace, hours of revery in choir and chapter-house and Lady Chapel,—it is so that one is taken to the heart of all this holy beauty. The foundation dates back to the beginning of the eighth century, but Saxon church melted into Norman, and Norman into Early English,—substantially the cathedral of to-day, with that wonderful façade of which Fuller truly said: "England affordeth not the like." The story of the city is the story of the church, andthe story of the church is one of honour and untroubled peace. Not being a monastery, it was untouched by the blow that smote Glastonbury down. The rage of war has passed it by. Its bishops have left saintly memories. Above this matchless group of ecclesiastical buildings tender benignities brood like outspread wings. There is blessing in the very air.

Wells lies in a basin at the foot of the Mendip Hills, which offer tempting points for excursions. Our most uncanny trip was to Wookey Hole, where, according to a ballad in Percy's "Reliques," "a blear-eyed hag" used to dwell. A farmer, groaning with rheumatism, guided us along a rocky footpath to the cavern entrance, where an impish boy met us, gave us lighted tapers and himself literally blazed the way with a can of some lurid-burning oil. After scrambling up and scrambling down, frequently abjured by our little leader to "mind yer 'eads," we left Hell's Ladder behind us and came out into an open space known as the Witch's Kitchen. Here was the Witch herself, a sphinx-like figure made by the petrifaction of the water dripping from the roof. She received uswith a stolid stare, the graceless urchin threw a pebble at her flat nose, and we gladly scrambled back to upper day.

I have a pleasanter recollection of Cox's Cave at Cheddar, with its clearly defined pillars and pinnacles, some amber, some olive, some transparent, some musical. It requires but little imagination to distinguish in this fantastic world the queer assortment of "Hindoo Temple," "Mummy," "Bat's Wings," "Eagle's Wings," "Loaf of Bread," "Hanging Goose," "Rat running up a Rock," "Turkeys," "Carrots," and the splendid "Draperies." There is a place where stalagmite and stalactite nearly touch,—only one drop wanting, yet in all these years since Mr. Cox, while prosaically digging for a coach-house, discovered this elfin grotto, in 1837, that drop has not crystallised,—so slow is the underground sculptor.

All this region of the Mendip Hills, whose limestone cliffs rise sheer, terrace above terrace, is full of fascination. Traces of prehistoric man, as well as of extinct animal species, have been found in its deep caverns. In the Hyæna Den, when disclosed in 1852, the eyes of geologists could discern the veryplaces where our shaggy forbears had lighted their fires and cooked their food. It seems a far cry from those low-browed cave-folk to Lord Macaulay, who loved this West Country so well, and to John Locke, who was born in the village of Wrington,—a village which furthermore prides itself on one of the noblest church-towers in Somerset and on the decorous grave of Hannah More.

All manner of literary associations jostle one another in the town of Bath, to which at home I have heard English visitors liken our Boston. They meant it as a compliment, for Bath is a handsome city, even ranked by Landor, one of its most loyal residents, above the cities of Italy for purity and consistent dignity of architecture. To reach Bath we have journeyed east from the Mendip Hills into the valley of the Lesser Avon. Here "the Queen of all the Spas" holds her court, the tiers of pale stone terraces and crescents climbing up the steep sides of the valley to a height of some eight hundred feet.

Of the sights of Bath, the Abbey is most disappointing, and well it may be, for it was despoiled not only of its glass but even of its iron and lead by Henry VIII, and only ableak framework left to pass through a series of purchasers to the citizens. The west front wears a curious design of ladders on which battered angels clamber up and down. The interior has no "dim religious light," but gilt and colour and such a throng of gaudy monuments that the wits have made merry at the expense of the vaunted mineral springs.

"These walls, adorned with monument and bust,Show how Bath waters serve to lay the dust."

The healing quality of the waters is attributed, by the veracious Geoffrey of Monmouth, to the British king Bladud, father of King Lear. This Bladud, being skilled in sorcery, placed in the gushing spring a cunning stone that made the water hot and curative. The wizard met an untimely end in a flight on wings of his own devising. He rode the air safely from Bath to London, but there fell and was dashed in pieces on the roof of the temple of Apollo. The Romans knew the virtue of these waters, and modern excavation has disclosed, with other remnants of a perished splendour, elaborate Roman baths, arched and columned andbeautifully paved. It is so long since the hour when I went wandering down into those buried chambers that I but dimly recall a large central basin, where languid gold-fish circled in a green pool, begirt by a stone platform, old and mossy. This was set about with pilasters and capitals and all manner of classic fragments, among which were mingled bits of mediæval carving. For a Saxon monastery was founded here, where, according to the Exeter Book, still stood "courts of stone," and the baths were known and frequented throughout the Middle Ages and in Tudor and Stuart times. But the Bath of the eighteenth-century society-novel, the Bath of which Miss Burney and Miss Austen, Fielding and Smollet have drawn such graphic pictures, owed its being chiefly to Beau Nash. The city to which this gallant Oxonian came in 1703 was a mean, rough place enough. The baths were "unseemly ponds," open to the weather and to the view of the passersby, who found it amusing to pelt the invalid bathers with dead cats—poor pussies!—and frogs. But Nash secured a band of music for the Pump Room, set orderly balls on foot, and soonwon the title of King of Bath, which he made such a focus of fashion that the place grew during his lifetime from its poor estate into the comely city of to-day. This arbiter of elegance maintained a mimicry of royal pomp. His dress glistened with lace and embroidery and he travelled in a chaise drawn by six grey horses, with a full complement of outriders, footmen, and French horns.

The Pump Room is worth a visit. It is an oblong saloon, with a semicircular recess at either end. At the west end is a music gallery, and at the east a statue of Beau Nash. A three-fourths square of cushioned seats occupies the middle of the room and opens toward a counter. Here a white-capped maid dispenses, at twopence a glass, the yellow fluid which hisses up hot from a fountain just behind her and falls murmuring into a marble vase. And all about, a part of the spectacle, sit the health-seekers, sipping the magic water from glasses in decorated saucers and looking a trifle foolish.

Here, or in steering one's course among the Bath chairs that claim a native's right of way in park and promenade, fancy maychoose almost any companion she will. Pope hated Bath, to be sure, and called it "the sulphurous pit," but not even Pope kept out of it; Beckford, the author of "Vathek," lived here; Butler, author of the "Analogy," died here; Pepys scribbled a page of his "Diary" here; Herschel the astronomer played a chapel-organ here; Lord Chesterfield's manners and Sheridan's wit found here an apt field of exercise; but for my part—and it was a scandalous choice, with the ghosts of Pitt and Burke, Wolfe and Nelson, Cowper and Scott and Goldsmith and Moore ready to do escort duty—I wished for the company of Chaucer's Wife of Bath, for such a piquant gossip could not have failed to add some entertaining items to the story of the town.

Our final pilgrimage of last summer was made to Clevedon, a lonely village which has within half a century become a popular summer resort. It lies

"By that broad water of the west,"

where the Severn merges into the Bristol Channel. Here is Myrtle Cottage, where Coleridge and his bride had their brief season of joy.

"Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rosePeeped at the chamber window. We could hearAt silent noon, and eve, and early mornThe sea's faint murmur. In the open airOur myrtle blossomed; and across the porchThick jasmines twined."

It was here that this poet of boundless promise,

"The rapt one of the godlike forehead,The heaven-eyed creature,"

wrote his "Æolian Harp," his "Frost at Midnight," and other lyrics touched with an unwonted serenity and sweetness, and here that Hartley Coleridge was born.

ST. PETER'S CHURCH, CLEVEDONST. PETER'S CHURCH, CLEVEDON

But our first walk took us by the beach and across the fields to that "obscure and solitary church" where lies Tennyson's Arthur, son of Henry Hallam the historian, and himself a poet. He was in Vienna when

"God's finger touch'd him and he slept,"

and Tennyson linked the Austrian and the English rivers in his elegy.

"The Danube to the Severn gaveThe darken'd heart that beat no more;They laid him by the pleasant shore,And in the hearing of the wave."There twice a day the Severn fills;The salt sea-water passes by,And hushes half the babbling Wye,And makes a silence in the hills."

"The Danube to the Severn gaveThe darken'd heart that beat no more;They laid him by the pleasant shore,And in the hearing of the wave.

"There twice a day the Severn fills;The salt sea-water passes by,And hushes half the babbling Wye,And makes a silence in the hills."

The ancient church, now but seldom opened for service, was locked, and we had to hunt for the sexton. It was dusk when he arrived, but we groped our way to the south transept and, by the light of a lifted taper, made out the pathetic farewell:

VALE DULCISSIMEVALE DILECTISSIMEDESIDERATISSIMEREQUIESCAS IN PACE

It was this tablet that haunted the restlessness of Tennyson's grief as, on moonlight nights, he would seem to see that lustre which fell across his bed slipping into the transept window and becoming "a glory on the walls."

"The marble bright in dark appears,As slowly steals a silver flameAlong the letters of thy name,And o'er the number of thy years."The mystic glory swims away;From off my bed the moonlight dies;And closing eaves of wearied eyesI sleep till dusk is dipt in grey:"And then I know the mist is drawnA lucid veil from coast to coast,And in the dark church like a ghostThy tablet glimmers to the dawn."

"The marble bright in dark appears,As slowly steals a silver flameAlong the letters of thy name,And o'er the number of thy years.

"The mystic glory swims away;From off my bed the moonlight dies;And closing eaves of wearied eyesI sleep till dusk is dipt in grey:

"And then I know the mist is drawnA lucid veil from coast to coast,And in the dark church like a ghostThy tablet glimmers to the dawn."

From Clevedon, from Bath, from Cheddar, from Wells, the roads lead to Bristol, which must not, if only for the sake of poor Chatterton, be ignored. This worn, dignified old city has had something of a vagrant career. Before the Norman Conquest, and for long after, Bristol stood north of the Avon and was a Gloucestershire town. In course of time it stretched across the river and lay partly in Somerset. And in the fourteenth century, when for wealth and consequence it ranked second only to London, Edward III created it a county by itself. From the dawn of its history it was a trading-mart. Nothing came amiss to it, even kidnapping, so that among its gains it gained the title "Stepmother of all England." The merchants and the mariners of Bristol stood in the front of English enterprise. Even in the time of Stephen it was deemed wellnigh the richest city of the kingdom. When a foreign war was in hand, Bristol could be counted on for a large contingentof ships and men. Its merchants lived in towered mansions, with capacious cellars for the storage of their goods, warehouses and shops on the street floor, the family parlours and bedrooms above, and attics for the prentices in the sharp-pitched gables. The banquet-halls, at the rear of these spacious dwellings, were splendid with carven roofs, rich tapestries, and plate that would have graced a royal board. Even the critical Pepys, who visited Bristol after its Spanish and West Indian trades were well established, found its quay "a most large and noble place."

Bristol sailors bear no small part in the tales of English sea-daring and records of discovery. As early as 1480, Bristol merchants were sending out tall ships to search west of Ireland for "the Island of Brazil and the Seven Cities." Sixteen years later the Venetian mariner, John Cabot, probably accompanied by his son Sebastian—"shadow-seekers," the old Bristol tars would call them—had touched the coast of North America. On his return the "Great Admiral" clad himself in silk and was a notable figure in the Bristol streets. Phantasmalthough it all seems in a retrospect of centuries, many are the men who have drawn the gaze in these ever-moving thoroughfares,—William Canynges, "Merchant Royal," whose trade with the north of Europe probably exceeded that of any other merchant in England; Thomas Norton, fifteenth-century alchemist and dreamer, who believed that he had discovered both the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life; Captain Thomas James, for whom James's Bay is named, he whose search for the Northwest Passage is one of the heroic chapters in the annals of the sea; the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, always deep in talk with some grizzled seaman; Captain Martin Pring, proud of the load of sassafras he had brought back from Cape Cod; Colston the philanthropist, the local saint. Mere literary folk would have been embarrassed by little enough attention as they went their quiet ways. What was Chatterton to the trading, shipbuilding, ship-lading town but a bright-eyed Blue-Coat boy? And how those hard-headed merchants would have chuckled over the eager scheme of three penniless young poets, Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell, for foundinga community on the Susquehanna—a river of melodious name and delightfully far away—where no one should labour more than two hours out of the twenty-four!

I have been in Bristol several times, but I remember the workaday old city as I saw it first. It was September weather, and College Green was strewn with sallow leaves that flitted and whispered continually like memories of the past. A few fat sheep were in possession, together with a statue of Queen Victoria and a Gothic cross. On the south of the Green, once the burial-ground of the abbey, stands the cathedral, the older portion, in contrast with the new, looking black and rough and massy. The jewel of this building—which was one of the few abbey churches to profit by the Dissolution, in that Henry VIII was graciously pleased, establishing the bishopric of Bristol, to raise it to cathedral rank—is its Norman chapter-house, a rectangular chamber wonderfully enriched with stone carvings and diaper work and interlaced arcades. Among the bishops on whom the silvery lights from the Jesse window, the great east window of the choir, have fallen, are Fletcher, father of thedramatist, and Trelawney of Cornish fame. With a lingering look at the Norman archway known as College gate, whose elaborate mouldings are worn on the sea-wind side, but still distinct on the other, I crossed the Green to the Mayor's Chapel, a little Gothic church of peculiar beauty, with windows that are harmonies in glass, and with monuments, among which the burgess element is marked, so old and strange, yet so naïve and natural, that the valour, love, and grief of a far past seem but held in slumber there. If the marble figures rise and talk together on All Saints' Eve, it is a quaint but seemly assemblage.

Bristol, even in the palmy days of her rum-trade and her slave-trade, was always singularly given to religion, and her churches are numerous,—St. Peter's, her mother-church, with an Early Norman tower, guarding the ashes of her hapless poet, Richard Savage, who died, a debtor, in Newgate prison hard by and was buried at his jailer's costs; St. Stephen's, whose turreted Perpendicular tower is one of the sights of the city; and many another; but supreme among them all,

"The pride of Bristowe and the Western londe,"

is St. Mary Radcliffe. This superb structure, ever since the day when Queen Bess called it "the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish-church in England," has gone on adding praise to praise. It is of ancient foundation, still observing, at Whitsuntide, the ceremony of rush-bearing, but it was rebuilt, in course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by Mayor Canynges the grandfather and Mayor Canynges the grandson. It is a pity that their alabaster heads should be all scratched over with initials. It was in this church that Chatterton pretended to discover the manuscript poems of his invented monk Rowley; it was here that Coleridge and Southey wedded the ladies of their Pantisocratical choice; and every good American is expected to thrill at the sight of the armour, hanging from one of the piers, of the gallant admiral, Sir William Penn, a native of Bristol and the father of our Quaker.

On my first visit, I righteously went on bustop out to Clifton, the breathing-place of Bristol, viewed the great grassy upland, with the Avon flowing muddily through a deep gorge, paced the boasted Suspension Bridge that spans the gorge, and finally, byway of tribute to "Evelina" and "Humphrey Clinker," followed "the zigzag" down to the Hotwells, whose glory as a spa is now departed. But of all that one may see in or about Bristol, nothing so impresses the mind as the big, plain, serious old town itself. It has been out-distanced in commerce and in manufacture by those giant upstarts, Liverpool and Manchester, yet it is still patiently pushing on in its accustomed track. So absorbed in business routine does it seem that one almost forgets that it has ever had other than practical interests,—that the "Lyrical Ballads" found their publisher here,—but gives one's self over to the latent romance of commerce and of trade. One wanders through Corn Street and Wine Street and Christmas Street, by Bakers' Hall and Spicers' Hall and Merchant Venturers' Hall, and—for the tidal Avon is navigable even for vessels of large tonnage—is ever freshly astonished, as Pope was astonished, to behold "in the middle of the street, as far as you can see, hundreds of ships, their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable."

The last great city in our summer path was Exeter, whose greatness is of the past. Exeter is, like Bristol, a county of itself, and yet stands, in a true sense, as the capital of Devonshire. It is, moreover, the heart of the whole West Country. "In Exeter," says Mr. Norway, a Cornishman, "all the history of the West is bound up—its love of liberty, its independence, its passionate resistance to foreign conquerors, its devotion to lost causes, its loyalty to the throne, its pride, its trade, its maritime adventure,—all these many strands are twined together in that bond which links West Countrymen to Exeter. There is no incident in their past history which does not touch her. Like them she was unstained by heathendom, and kept her faith when the dwellers in less happy cities further north were pricked to the worship of Thor and Odin at the point of Saxon spears. Like them she fought valiantly against the Norman Conqueror, and when she fell their cause fell with her. And since those days what a host of great and stirring incidents have happened here, from Perkin Warbeck beating on the gates with his rabble of brave Cornishmen, to William of Orange going in highstate to the cathedral, welcomed already as a deliverer to that throne which it lay almost with Exeter to give or to withhold."

Exeter impresses the stranger to-day merely as a prosperous county-town, a pleasant cathedral city, yet in the reign of Stephen it was ranked for importance next after London, York, and Winchester, supplanting Lincoln, once the holder of the fourth place, from which it was soon itself to be dislodged by Bristol. But Exeter, seated on the hill where, in dim, wild ages a band of Britons built them a rude stronghold, beside the stream up whose reddened waters the vessels of Roman and Saxon and Dane have fought their way, does not forget. So faithful is her memory, indeed, that still the vicar of Pinhoe, a village almost in her suburbs, receives every year a handful of shining silver pieces in recognition of a deed of daring performed by a long-ago predecessor in his holy office. When the West Countrymen, bent on driving out the Danes, were in the thick of a hard fight there at Pinhoe, their supply of arrows fell short, and this plucky priest, girding up his gown, dodged through the enemy to the citadel, bringing back—so schoolboyish werethose old battles—a bundle of feathered shafts that might have saved the day. But although the Danes triumphed, Exeter has paid an annual reward of sixteen shillings to the vicar of Pinhoe ever since—a period of some nine hundred years.

We rendered, of course, our first homage to the cathedral, rejoicing in the oft-praised symmetries of the interior and, hardly less, in the tender colour-tones that melted, blues into greys, and fawns into creams, with the softening of the light. The cathedral library contains that treasure of our literature, the Exeter Book, an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry, "one great English book of divers things, song-wise wrought," left by the will of Bishop Leofric, who died in 1072, to "Saint Peter's minster in Exeter where his bishop-stool is." Miles Coverdale, translator of the Bible, was bishop here in Tudor times, and Sir Jonathan Trelawney, transferred from the poorer see of Bristol, held for eighteen years Exeter's episcopal throne,—a "bishop-stool" most magnificently fashioned. This Trelawney was one of the "Seven Bishops" who clashed with James II and were thrown into prison. His home was in Cornwall,and the famous song, which may owe its present form to the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the eccentric vicar of Morwenstow, thunders the wrath of the West Country:

"And have they fixed the where and when?And shall Trelawney die?Here's twenty thousand CornishmenWill know the reason why."

And speaking of vicars, the most hurried tourist should cast a glance up to the red tower of St. Thomas' church, for the sake of another clergyman who dared brave a king. The vicar of St. Thomas was conspicuous in the West Country rebellion against the reformed service, involving the use of an English prayer-book, introduced by law in 1549. The men of Devon and, even more, the men of Cornwall, who understood the English hardly better than the Latin, looked upon this new form of worship as "but a Christmas game" and could not "abide to hear of any other religion than as they were first nuzled in." This Exeter vicar went on chanting the Latin liturgy and wearing his old vestments, so that, for his contumacy, he was hanged "in his popish apparel" from a gallows erected on top of his own church-tower.

Of the secular buildings in Exeter, we visited the fine-fronted guildhall in High Street and Mol's Coffee House in the Cathedral Yard. The custodian of the guildhall proudly pointed out the beauties of its fifteenth-century carvings, and hospitably invited us to try on the gorgeous robes of the civic dignitaries and sit in their great chairs of fretted oak, but we contented ourselves with viewing the various treasures of the old burgh on exhibition there,—gold chains of office, silver salvers and loving-cups, a huge, two-handed sword that long since drank its last draught of blood in the fierce grip of Edward IV, a portrait of the Stuart princess who, when Charles I and Queen Henrietta were in sore straits, had been born and sheltered at Exeter, and many another memento of an eventful and honourable past. We went away rapt in visions of those blithe Midsummer Eves when all the Exeter guilds, preceded by a mounted band consisting of Mayor and Alderman and Council, made the circuit of the city walls, the image of St. Peter borne before the Fishmongers, that of St. Luke before the Painters, and every other trade in like manner preceded by its especialpatron saint; but Mol's Coffee House called up a later picture of

"Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher,John Hawkins, and your other English captains,"

who, with their Devonshire countrymen, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Richard Grenville, Sir Walter Raleigh, used to meet in the oak-panelled hall of this Tudor mansion for such high, adventurous talk as must have made the wine sparkle in their cups.

A DEVON COTTAGEA DEVON COTTAGE

We were a little tired in Exeter, I remember, but instead of prying out from the west wall of the cathedral, as we would have done three hundred years ago, a bit of "Peter-stone" to cure our ailments, we took a blissful drive up the Exe,—such a trickle of a stream just then that only regard for the coachman's feelings restrained us from making fun of it,—through the tranquil beauty of Devonshire lanes, by thatched cottage and lordly park and one dreamy little church after another, each with its special feature of pinnacled tower, or Saxon font, or quaint old pew, or frieze of angel frescoes. We passed a modest almshouse, perhaps the bequest of husband and wife for the maintenance offour widows or two married couples. At all events, the inscription beneath a portrait head in relief ran:

"Grudge not my laurell.Rather blesse that PowerWhich made the death of twoThe life of fowre."

Every mile of Devonshire has its charm, not to be mapped out in advance, but freshly discovered by each new lover of the moorland and the sea, of soft air and the play of shadows, of folklore and tradition, of the memory of heroes. Those who cannot know fair Devon in actual presence may find her at her best in the romances of Kingsley and Blackmore and Phillpotts. The shire abounds in sea-magic. The south coast, with its wealth of sheltered bays and tempting inlets, has so mild and equable a climate that its dreamy windings have become dotted with winter resorts as well as watering-places. Lyme Regis, on the edge of Dorset, Sidmouth and Exmouth and Dawlish, Teignmouth, whence Keats dated his "Endymion," and fashionable Torquay are perhaps the most in favour, but all the shore is warm and wonderful in colour, set as it is with wave-washed cliffsthat glisten ruddy and white and rose-pink in the sun. These shining headlands, about which beat the wild white wings of seagulls, are haunted by legends wilder yet. Half-way between Dawlish and Teignmouth are two red sandstone pillars, the statelier with its top suggestive of a tumbled wig, the lower standing at a deferential tilt. In these are shut the sinful souls of an East Devon clergyman and his clerk, who longed too eagerly, in the hope of their own preferment, for the death of a Bishop of Exeter.

Further down the coast the health seekers and holiday folk are somewhat less in evidence. The old, cliff-climbing town of Brixham, where William of Orange landed, goes fishing for a livelihood. Dartmouth, not so joyous to-day as when Cœur de Lion gathered there the fleet that was to win for Christendom the Holy Sepulchre, not so turbulent as when Chaucer suspected his wild-bearded seaman, little better than a pirate, of hailing from that port, not so adventurous as when one John Davis, of Sandridge on the Dart, sailed out from her blue harbour with his two small vessels, the Sunneshine and the Moonshine, to seek a passage to China byway of the Polar sea, is mainly occupied in the training of midshipmen. A steamer trip up the Dart, that sudden and dangerous stream of neighbourhood dread

—"River of Dart, river of Dart,Every year thou claimest a heart"—

brings us to Totnes, where, on the high authority of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first king of the Britons, Brutus, grandson of the pious Æneas, made his landing.

"Here I am, and here I res',And this town shall be called Totnes."

The Brutus Stone, on which the Trojan first set foot, is shown in irrefutable proof of this event. In the course of the trip, the steamer passes Greenway House, where Sir Humphrey Gilbert was born and where, it is claimed, the potato first sprouted in English soil.

But the most momentous of all these southern ports, Plymouth, wears an aspect worthy of its renown. The spell of the briar-rose has not choked its growth, although the glamour of a glorious past enhances its present greatness. As we gazed from PlymouthHoe, a lofty crescent on the sea-front, with a magnificent outlook across the long granite break-water and the Sound alive with all manner of shipping, past the Eddystone Light to the Atlantic, our thoughts, even while recognising the prosperity of this modern naval station, flew back to those brave old times when the steep streets and the high bluff rang not only with the gruff hails of bronzed sea-captains,

"dogs of an elder dayWho sacked the golden ports,"

but with the merry quips and laughter of the gay young blades who loved to ruffle it before the Devon belles.

"How Plymouth swells with gallants! how the streetsGlister with gold! You cannot meet a manBut trikt in scarf and feather."

Sumptuous ocean liners call at Plymouth now; the terrible war-ships of England ride that ample roadstead; but we remembered the gallant little crafts of yore, the Dreadnought and the Defiance, the Swiftsure, the Lion, the Rainbow, the Nonpareil, the Pelican, the Victory, and the Elizabeth. It was from Plymouth that Drake, "fellow-travellerof the Sunn," put forth on the voyage that circumnavigated the globe, and here he was playing at bowls when on the Hoe was raised the cry that the Spanish Armada had been sighted. But not all the galleons of Spain could flurry "Franky Drake."

"Drake nor devil nor Spaniard feared;Their cities he put to the sack;He singed His Catholic Majesty's beard,And harried his ships to wrack.He was playing at Plymouth a rubber of bowlsWhen the great Armada came,But he said, 'They must wait their turn, good souls;'And he stooped and finished the game."

His statue presides over the broad esplanade, looking steadily seaward,—a sight that put us again to quoting Newbolt:

"Drake, he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away,(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?)Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships,Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe,An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin',He sees it arl so plainly as he saw et long ago."Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas,(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?)Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease,An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.'Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,Strike et when your powder's runnin' low;If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven,An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.'"

"Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas,(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?)Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease,An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.'Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,Strike et when your powder's runnin' low;If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven,An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.'"

It is hard to put by those visions of the Armada days even to think of Sir Walter Raleigh's tragic return to Plymouth and the block, his high heart foiled at last in its long quest for the golden city of Manoa; and I hardly dare confess that we quite forgot to hunt out the special nook whence the Mayflower, with her incredible load of furniture and ancestors, set sail to found another Plymouth on a bleaker shore.

THE FALTHE FAL

The northern coast of Devonshire, with its more bracing air, is no less enchanting than the southern. Charles Kingsley, born under the brow of Dartmoor, has lavished on North Devon raptures of filial praise, but the scenes of "Westward Ho!" fully bear out his glowing paragraphs. It is years ago that I passed an August in Clovelly, but the joy of it lingers yet. Nothing that I have ever seen on this our starry lodging-place, with its infinite surprises of beauty, resembles that white village climbing the cleft of a wooded cliff,its narrow street only a curving slope, a steep passage here and there smoothed into steps, where donkeys and pedestrians rub amiable shoulders. At a turn in this cobbled stairway, your gaze, which has been held between two lines of the quaintest little houses, all diversified with peaks and gables, porches and balconies, window displays of china and pots of flowering vines, suddenly falls to a tiny harbour, a pier built out from the natural rock and hung with fishing-nets, a tangle of red-sailed boats, and a pebbly beach from which we used to watch the sunset flushing sea and cliffs. The five hundred dwellers in this hanging hamlet must all be of a kin, for Clovelly lads, we were told by our landlady, never do well if they marry outside the combe. Kindest of gossips! She tucked us away as best she could in such bits of rooms that, like Alice in Wonderland, we had to thrust one foot up chimney and one arm out of the window among the fuchsias and geraniums that make nothing, in Clovelly, of growing to a height of twenty feet. She would put us up wonderful luncheons of duck sandwiches and heather-honey and lime-water delicately flavoured from the oldwhiskey bottles into which it was poured, when we were starting out on those long walks to which North Devon air and views allure the laziest. Sometimes we followed the Hobby Drive, a wooded avenue along the top of the cliff, where for considerable distances a wall of noble timber, beech and oak and chestnut, glistening hollies and red-berried rowans, would shut out the view, and again the foliage would open and the eye could range across an opal sea to Lundy Island. On other days we would stroll through Clovelly Court to the summit of White Cliff, known as Gallantry Bower, whence one may look at choice far out over blowing woods or tossing waves. The towering trees of the park, trees that Will Carey may have climbed, are so ancient now that ferns and mosses grow on their decaying branches. Once we picked our way over the shingles to Bucks Mill, gathering only to drop again handfuls of the curiously flecked and banded pebbles. The water seemed to have as many colours as they, tans and russets and copper-tints innumerable, with shifting gleams of turquoise and of beryl. Bucks Mill is a fishing-hamlet of some one hundredand fifty souls, representing two original families, one of which, "the Browns," a swarthy and passionate race, is said to descend from Spanish sailors wrecked off the coast when gale and billow sided with England against the hapless Armada.

Another day we walked to Stoke, seven miles thither and seven miles back, to see the Saxon church raised by the Countess Elgitha in gratitude for the escape from shipwreck of her husband, Earl Godwin. All the way we were passing cottages that seemed to have strayed out of an artist's portfolio. Their rosy walls of Devonshire cob—the reddish mud of the region mixed with pebbles—were more than half hidden by the giant fuchsias and clambering honeysuckles. Even the blue larkspur would grow up to the thatch. Too often our road was shut in by hedges and we trudged along as in a green tunnel roofed with blue. Dahlias and hydrangias, poppies, hollyhocks and roses filled the cottage dooryards and gardens with masses of bloom. We asked a woman smiling in her vine-wreathed doorway how near we were to Hartland. "Win the top of yon hill," she said, "and you'll soon slip away into it."So we slipped away and were refreshed in another cottage doorway by two glasses of skim-milk for a penny. We found a grave old church at Stoke, with legions of rooks wheeling about the massive tower which has so long been a beacon for storm-tossed mariners. The white-bearded verger, whose rolling gait betrayed the sailor, read to us in stentorian tones, punctuated with chuckles, an epitaph which, in slightly varied form, we had seen elsewhere in Devon:

Back to Index Next