From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.

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, 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.

"The pride of Bristowe and the Western londe,"

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, by way 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 high state 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 were those 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 especial patron saint; but Mol's Coffee House called up a later picture of 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.

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

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 of four 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 cliffs that 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 by way 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 Plymouth Hoe, 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-traveller of 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.'"

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 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 old whiskey 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 hundred and 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:

"Here lies I at the church door.Here lies I because I's poor.The farther in, the more to pay;But here lies I as well as they."

Our homeward walk, by a different road, gave us a clearer impression of the ranges of naked hilltops which make up the Hartland parish. Upon those rounded summits rested a mellow western light which had dimmed into dusk when we finally risked our weary bones on the slippery "back staircase" of Clovelly.

We journeyed from Clovelly to Bideford by carrier's cart, sitting up with what dignity we could amidst a remarkable miscellany of packages. Once arrived at Kingsley's hero-town, we read, as in honour bound, the opening chapter of "Westward Ho!" crossed the historic bridge and sought out in the church the brass erected to the noble memory of Sir Richard Grenville, who drove the little Revenge with such a gallant recklessness into the thick of the Spanish fleet, fought his immortal fight, and died of his wounds "with a joyful and quiet mind." The exceeding charm of this Bristol Channel coast made us intolerant of trains and even of coaches, so that at lovely, idle Ilfracombe we took to our feet again and walked on by a cliff path to Combe Martin. Here we were startled, on going to bed, to find packed away between the thin mattresses a hoard of green pears, hard as marbles, and not much bigger, which the small boy of the inn, apparently intent on suicide, had secreted. The towered church, some eight or nine centuries old, was shown to us by a sexton who claimed that the office had descended in his family from father to son for the past three hundred years. However that may be, he was an entertaining guide, reading off his favourite "posy-stones" with a relish, and interpreting the carvings of the curious old rood-screen according to a version of Scripture unlike any that we had known before. Thence our way climbed up for two toilsome miles through a muddy sunken lane, in whose rock walls was a growth of dainty fern. It was good to come out in view of the rival purples of sunny sea and heathery hills, good to be regaled on "cold shoulder" and Devonshire junket in a stone-floored kitchen with vast fireplace and ponderous oaken settles, good to start off again across Trentishoe Common, glorious with gorse, and down the richly wooded combe, past a farmyard whose great black pig grunted at us fearsomely, and still down and down, through the fragrance of the pines. We turned off our track to follow the eddying Heddon to the sea, and had, in consequence, a stiff scramble to gain our proper path cut high in the Channel side of the cliff. We walked along that narrow way in a beauty almost too great to bear, but the stress of emotion found some relief in the attention we had to give to our footing, for the cliff fell sheer to the sunset-coloured waters. We spent the night at Wooda Bay, walking on in the morning for a jocund mile or two through fresh-scented larchwoods, then across Lee Abbey Park and through the fantastic Valley of Rocks, along another cliff-walk and down a steep descent to Lynmouth, where Shelley's "myrtle-twined cottage" stands upon the beach. Lynmouth, where the songs of sea and river blend, was more to our taste in its picturesque mingling of the old and the new, of herring-village and watering-place, than its airy twin, Linton, perched on the cliff-top four hundred feet above, but both are little paradises and, having located ourselves in one, the first thing we did was to leave it and visit the other. We lingered for a little in this exquisite corner of creation, till one blithe morning we could put up no longer with the saucy challenge of the Lyn and chased that somersaulting sprite, that perpetual waterfall, five miles inland, so coming out on the heathery waste of Exmoor.

We would gladly have turned gipsies then and there, if so we might have wandered all over and over that beautiful wild upland, and down through the undulating plain of mid-Devon, with its well-watered pastures and rich dairy-farms for whose butter and cheese the Devonshire sailors, as Hakluyt's narratives tell, used to long sorely on their far voyages. But the genuine garden of Devon is South Hams, below Dartmoor and between the Teign and the Tamar. This is the apple-country of which the poet sings:

"For me there's nought I would not giveFor the good Devon land,Whose orchards down the echoing cleeveBedewed with spray-drift stand,And hardly bear the red fruit upThat shall be next year's cider-cup."

Little as Parson Herrick, the indignant incumbent of Dean Prior, enjoyed his Devonshire charge, the cider industry of the region must have appealed to him.

But this broad county, outranked in size only by York and Lincolnshire, has in its south, as in its north, a desolate tableland. Dartmoor has been described as a "monstrous lump of granite, covered with a peaty soil." The rocks are rich in lead and iron, tin and copper, but the soil is too poor even for furze to flourish in it. Heather, reeds, moss and whortleberries make shift to grow, and afford a rough pasturage to the scampering wild ponies, the moor-sheep and red cattle. It is a silent land of rugged tors and black morasses, of sudden mists and glooms, of prehistoric huts, abandoned mines, and, above all, for "Superstition clings to the granite," of dark stories, weird spells, and strange enchantments. Indeed, it folds a horror in its heart, – Dartmoor Prison, where our American sailors suffered a century ago, and where English convicts are now ringed in by grim walls and armed sentries. It is said that even to-day, when a Dartmoor child gets a burn, the mother's first remedy is to lay her thumb upon the smarting spot and repeat: