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 the dramatist, 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, 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 Cornishmen
Will 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
"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.
[Illustration: A 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 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 Power
Which made the death of two
The 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 Coeur 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 day
Who 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 streets
Glister with gold! You cannot meet a man
But 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 bowls
When 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.
[Illustration: THE 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 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.