seizure of arms was made at Plymouth. The Duke of Ormond, 'Queen Anne's darling,' appeared at the entrance of the harbour with a French armament, intending, on his landing, which never took place, to set up the standard of the Stuarts; and Sir Coplestone Bamfylde was carried off to the Tower in state, on a charge of treasonable correspondence with the Pretender; for which the ten days' journey to London in his coach and six, with the necessary accompaniments of upsets and stickings in the mud, was perhaps sufficient punishment. There was, however, no real disturbance in Devonshire; and throughout the reigns of the Georges the county steadily increased in wealth and prosperity, although not without such changes as were more or less distasteful to the Sir Hildebrands :

'The capacious tankard of double-racked cyder,' writes Chappell of Exeter, about the time of George III.'s accession, or wholesome tho' home-brewed October beer, improved by the addition of a nut-brown toast, with which, and perhaps a broil'd rasher, or a steak of hung beef, the hospitable Franklin of the last century could regale himself, his neighbours, and friends,- —are now rejected for a compleat set of tea-tackle and a sugar-loaf; the bounties of Ceres and Pomona undervalued, and the dispiriting infusion of the leaves of an Asiatic shrub preferr'd to the exhilarating beverage derived from the red-streak apple tree or the barley mow. The glittering rows of pewter plates and platters, which of yore adorned the dresser and shelves of the neat, and œconomic housewife, give place to frangible earthen dishes and saucers, less fit for their purposes than even the wooden trenchers in use before the neglect to cultivate and preserve our timber made more work for the miners, pewterers, and cutters. But glazed earthen plates must now dull the edges of our knives; and the country squire, to keep a step higher than his neighbouring farmers, to please his modish madam, and escape being censured as a tasteless churl, must. prefer the brittleness and frailty of Dresden porcelain, to the solidity and permanence of Damnonian pewter.'

*

We have already noticed many distinguished Devonshire worthies; but the list of those less immediately connected with the actual march of events is far longer, and certainly not less important. The 'pious ghosts' of Hooker, of Jewell, and of Reynolds, need scarcely be called up here. The birthplace of the second, Bowden, an old farm-house in the parish of Berry Narbor, is still pointed out: of the other two, no record survives in their native county. Nor must we delay longer among the lawyers-although the list is no ordinary one, beginning with Henry the Sixth's Lord Chancellor Fortescue, author of the

*Review of part of Risdon's Survey of Devon. Chappell was for many years the steward of Sir William Courtenay.

remarkable

6

remarkable treatise 'De Laudibus Legum Angliæ,' and ending with Sir William Follett. We proceed to the poets, over whom the streams and valleys of the West exercised a more direct and lasting influence. Three, who have obtained permanent places in the literature of England, were resident in Devonshire at the commencement of the civil war-William Browne, author of Britannia's Pastorals;' Ford, the dramatist; and Robert Herrick. The two former were natives; and, if the principle on which Fuller has arranged his worthies is to hold good, Non ubi nascor sed ubi pascor,' Herrick must also be claimed as a Devonian, since his 'Hesperides' are at least as full of the daffodils and violets that star the steep crofts and orchards of Dean Prior, as of any recollections carried westward from Cheapside, or from the Apollo' at Temple Bar. Ford, the gloomy and terrible subjects of whose tragedies seem partly to have reflected his own temperament, had returned from London to die at his birthplace, Ilsington, near Ashburton. The melancholy music of his verses will haunt the wanderer beneath the gnarled and storm-twisted oaks which there stretch upward toward the heaths of Dartmoor; but, with the exception of an occasional word, extinct elsewhere, but still to be heard in Devonshire, there is little trace in his works of any influence caught from the scenery and associations of his native district. Nor does he seem to have been himself remembered there; and Prince's worthies of the name of Ford are authors of Treatises about Singing Psalins,* and the like

6

C There goes the parson, most illustrious spark!

And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk.'

As some compensation for the want of Devonshire allusions in Ford, the Britannia's Pastorals' of Browne exhibit throughout a series of careful landscape paintings from his native county. The banks of the Tavy, the Walla brook which flows into it, and the wooded hollow of Ina's Coombe, close to Tavistock, are all directly referred to; and the copses, the steep ferny lanes, and the wild flowers which make up the staple of his pictures, are all studies from the same neighbourhood. The many direct local allusions in Browne's poems have been well illustrated by Mrs. Bray, herself one of the celebrities of Tavistock.

The wildest district of Devonshire-the forest of Dartmoorhas found an ardent and accomplished laureate in Carrington, whose poem reflects its character with most entire and loving fidelity. The wide, shadow-swept wastes of heather, the sound of rocky waters, and the turf smoke slowly ascending through the sharp mountain air, come back to us as we turn over its pages.

The

The wanderer on Dartmoor should by all means make Carrington his companion. His poem has well been compared to certain wines, which can be drunk in perfection nowhere but among their native hills; and with Carrington in one hand, and Mr. Murray's red book in the other, it will be the traveller's own fault if he misses the most remarkable points of beauty or of interest. As in all similar regions, the borders of the central moors are more picturesque than the highland itself, which forms the watershed of the county, and rises, at its greatest eminence, to a height of more than 2000 feet. Deep, narrow coombes, covered with a coppice of birch and oak, lie between the hills that extend, like bastions, into the lower country; and each of the river valleysthe Plym, the Dart, the Teign, and many a lesser stream-presents scenes of ancient, untouched woodland, and, in its upper course, of granite-strewn glen and ferny hill, such as might well inspire a far worse poet than Carrington. The tourist may make a circuit of Dartmoor, never leaving, for more than a hundred miles, this wild and romantic scenery, far more suggestive of the days of Sir Tristrem or of Britomart, than of these brisker times of telegraph and railroad. It resenibles, and very closely, those parts of Galloway-the scenery of Guy Mannering-which form a ring of wooded glens about the central moors and mountains. But the Devonshire landscape impresses us with a far greater sense of security and ancient peacefulness than that of Dumfriesshire or the Stewartry. No rude tower of lime and stane' rises on its heathery knoll at the head of the glen, or looks far out over the moors to catch the first glance of the distant forayers. The only enemies feared by the Devonshire franklin were 'winter and rough weather;' and the ancient farmhouses, with their granite porches, their great walnut trees, and the beehives ranged under their casements, are generally niched into the sunniest corner on the hill side, or preside over the green, quiet meadows through which the river sparkles onward. In early spring

When all the hills with moor-burn are a-blaze,'

and the peaks of the distant tors are half shrouded by wreaths of white smoke-when the bright green of the birch woods and larch plantations rivals the golden blaze of the furze, and every coppice is fragrant with great tufts of primroses, the scene from a hill-side on the Dartmoor border is exceeded in beauty by none with which it can be compared, either in England or in Scotland.

We must not, however, lose ourselves among the attractions of Devonshire scenery. In spite of their number and variety, no

great

great show-point has, we believe, been omitted in the Handbook.' Almost every class of scenery has its representative in the county, which supplies a not less wide range of climate, from the bracing, highland atmosphere of the moors to the sumy warmth of the south coast, where oranges and citrons ripen in the open air, and where flowers which are elsewhere treated as exotics-the lovely Devoniensis' rose among them-flourish unprotected throughout the winter. The two Devonshire railways, among the most picturesque in England, afford the tourist an easy access to much of the county; but he must still, if he mean really to enjoy it, wander among the intricate net-work of lanes which cross and recross it in all directions. And if the distant views are somewhat excluded, and roving propensities somewhat checked, no traveller with the eye of an artist will quarrel with the steep banks covered with ferns and wild flowers, and in due season scarlet with strawberries-most toothsome to the palate,' says old Fuller, who has placed them among the natural commodities' of Devon (I mean if with clarett wine or sweet cream), and so plentiful in this county that a traveller may gather them sitting on horseback in their hollow highwayes.' Such was the depth of these 'hollow highwayes' in Westcote's time, that he tells us a man might have then ridden from one end of Devonshire to the other without seeing a single flock of sheep. Perhaps the feat might still be accomplished; but the tourist must in such case carefully avoid the magnificent panoramas which open here and there from the lanes themselves, and which may always be seen by turning into the open fields at the hill

crests.

Until the tall hedges of the Devonshire lanes have entirely disappeared from the land-a consummation which, it may be feared, will follow in the train of modern agriculture-the ancient dialect of the county will continue to maintain its place. It will, no doubt, become obsolete as the province is more and more opened by railways and good roads; and in the mean time the diligence of the local antiquary should be exerted to procure as complete glossaries as possible.* The dialect should be of no small interest to archæologists, since, according to Giraldus Cambrensis (writing in 1204), the more ancient mode of speaking lingered longer in Devonshire than elsewhere,' although, he adds, the language now appears more unpolished

* The best illustrations of the Devonshire dialect which exist at present are the "Exmoor Scolding' and Mrs. Gwatkin's 'Dialogue.' The locality in which a word is found should always be carefully noticed, since the difference between the dialects of North and South Devon is considerable.

'incomposita.'

*

incomposita.' The ancient mode of speaking' was the genuine Saxon of Wessex; and words and phrases may yet be heard in Devonshire, which have never become extinct through all the changes of a thousand years. In what degree beauty, as well as antiquity, is to be found in the local dialect, is a question which will be variously decided, according as the judges are Devonians or not. Roger North, who accompanied the Lord Keeper Guildford on his circuit at the end of Charles II.'s reign, insists that the common speech of Devonshire is more barbarous than in any other part of England-the north not excepted.' Few certainly would now be found to agree in this judgment, although the stranger may still meet with many a word rusted with age, and requiring explanation to all but antiquarian ears. Where this is difficult, let us hope it may be as judiciously avoided as in the case recorded by Peter Pindar in his 'Royal Visit to Exeter :

'Now Varmer Tab, I understand,

Drode his legs vore, and catched the hand,

And shaked wey might and main :

"I'm glad your Medjesty to zee,

And hope your Medjesty," quoth he,

"Wull ne'er be mazed again."

"Mazed, mazed-What's mazed?" then said the King, “I never heerd of zich a thing;

What's mazed, what, what--my Lord?"

"Hem," zaid my Lord, and blowed his nose;
"Hem, hem, Zir-'tis, I do suppose,

Zir-zome old Devonshire word."

The agriculture of Devonshire-still sadly behind the rest of the world is improving year by year, and the enterprise of the greater landowners will, no doubt, eventually raise the county, in this respect, to a high position. The mild climate of its lower districts has been taken advantage of by the gardeners. Devonshire, among many other contributions, has supplied our lawns and ornamental grounds with the brilliant double furze and the evergreen or Luccombe' oak-a cross between the Turkey oak and the cork-tree. Such nurseries as those of Luccombe and Pince, and of the Veitches at Exeter, will sustain a comparison with any in the world; and among 'show places,' Mr. Loudon has pronounced the beautiful gardens and grounds of Bicton to be more complete in every branch, and in more

* Cambria Descriptio, l. i. c. 6, quoted by Sir Frederick Madden, Preface to Layamon's Brut, p. xxvi.

admirable