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fine;

The

where thin, the artificial grass very
hence I see that this last will thrive in a dry
season. Shaston, so they write it, stands
high; you nearly see across the island.
Glastonbury is visible from it; and on the
other hand, the view must reach the last
hills towards the Hampshire coast.
borough is notoriously venal. Sir Richard
Steele was once its member; he had com-
petitors who were able, and about to out-
bid him; his winning bribe was curious.
At a dinner to the burgesses, he laid an
apple on the table in the midst of the de-
sert, with one hundred guineas stuck into
it, to be given to that burgess's wife who
should be brought to bed the nearest to
nine months from that day. Ever after he
remained the Shaftsbury member!

sublimity of coachmanship. The box motion titillates the soles of the feet like snuff affects the nose. At the Globe I dismounted, swung my knapsack, and walked across the country into the Frome road. After six miles, the Salisbury coach overtook me, for by cross travelling I had got the start. I mounted, and reached Warminster. On the way, a poor woman on horseback was nearly run over by us, owing to her horse's backing restively. She was thrown, and hurt in the shoulder. Warminster is the most knavish posting town I was ever cheated at; they overcharge two miles on the Bath road, three on the Deptford Inn, and one to Shaftsbury. I walked to Shaftsbury, fifteen miles; the way for ten over the downs. Let not him talk of luxury who never has found a spring unexpectedly when foot travelling in a hot summer day. The larks sung merrily above me. The lark seems to live only for enjoyment; up he mounts, his song is evidently the song of delight; and when they descend, it is with outspread wings and motionless, still sing-washed bare by the winter rains, and looked ing. They make the great amusement of down-walking. To the right I saw Alfred's Tower; to the left, Beckford's magnificent pile. At Knoyle, ten miles, I eat cold meat and drank strong beer at an alehouse. There the downs ended, and my way was through fertility to Shaftsbury. The hay is every

1 There is no reader but will recollect Vinny Bourne's sweet lines; but I cannot pass by

the beautiful words of JEREMY TAYLOR in The
Return of Prayers: He says, " For so have I seen
a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring
upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get
to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the
poor bird was beaten back with the loud sigh-
ings of an eastern wind, and his motion made
irregular and inconstant, descending more at
every breath of the tempest, than it could re-
cover by the libration and frequent weighing of
his wings; till the little creature was forced to
sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was
over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and
did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and
motion from an angel as he passed sometimes
through the air, about his ministries here be-
low," Works, vol. v. p. 70. Ed. HEBER.
J. W, W.

Saturday. To Blandford, twelve, over the downs. I met nothing but crows, two weazles, and one humble bee, who seemed as little likely as myself to find a breakfast, for no flower grew on the bare scant herbage. The hill sides were in some places

like the bones of the earth. To Winbourne, nine, called ten; again over the downs the greater part of the way. The church here is very fine. I left visiting it till some future time. The people say it is finer than Christ Church, because it is a quarter Cathedral. To Christ Church, twelve. Faint and wearily, over the latter road of sand and loose gravel. Iremembered my way over the marsh. Came by our old dwelling, and arrived to a house of hospitality.

Thursday, 25th July, 1799. To Cross, to Bridgewater, eighteen and eighteen. To Minehead, twenty-six, through Stowey. This stage is remarkably fine. We passed the gibbet of the man whom Lloyd and Wordsworth have recorded, and the gate where he committed the murder. Our road lay through Watchet, the most miserable and beastly collection of man-sties I ever beheld. The Cornish boroughs are superb to it. Two and a half miles before we reached Minehead, is Dunster Castle, Mr. Luttrel's. The house is built to resemble an

old fortification modernized and made ha- | thirty. He might have been saved, but his

bitable, and some ruins stand near. It is on a well-wooded eminence. The park was in a little vale below; but the ground there is so fertile that it is now laid into pasturage and meadow land, and the park extends over the hills around. The sea view is very striking; Minehead stands under a headland, which projects boldly. This seat is said to command one of the finest views in England; if the water were clear and boundless, I should think so.

Minehead presents the cheerful appearance of a town rising from its ruins. New houses built and building every where, give a lively and clean appearance to it. The quay is ugly, but the view very striking along the indented coast towards Stowey. A circular eminence in the grounds at Dunster, with a building on its summit like a Tor, amidst wood, stands near the water. To the right, there is neither view nor passage; the quay blocks up the way. The Holms look well from hence; the water had even a bluishness; it was low, and therefore, I imagine, clearer; but the opposite shore was visible, and destroyed the immensity which makes sea views so impressively magnificent. From a hill on our way here we had one glorious burst of prospect. The sun fell on the sea through a mist, and on the crags of the shore they looked like a glittering faery fabric; the very muddiness of the water mellowed the splendour, and made it more rich and beautiful.

Half way up the hill, where the church stands, is the upper town, quite cut off from the lower, and perhaps containing more houses. Indeed, Minehead is like the Trinity, three; and these three are one: for the upper, and lower towns, and the quay, are all separated from each other by houseless lanes. The upper town is beyond any thing narrow, dirty, and poor; completely a lousy looking place. I never elsewhere saw so many houses in ruins, and that at such distant intervals as evidently not to have been destroyed by the fire. In the fire one life only was lost, a madman about

mother said, "Let en stay! let en stay! what shall us do we'en if we do save'en ?"

me.

Imagine a range of high hills (not mountains) covered with fern and furze, and the Channel at their foot, and you will have the features of this neighbourhood. I toiled up a long, long, very long ascent above the church; and when I reached the top, half trembled to see the sea immediately below The descent, however, though to the eye directly abrupt, was not precipitous. A path shelves along, sufficiently fearful to produce an emotion of pleasurable dread; yet perfectly safe, for almost in every part it would be practicable to walk to the beach. The descent is all furze and fern. In a clear day the houses on the opposite shore are distinct; but in hazy weather the view is finer, like the prospects of human life, because its termination is concealed.

The inland walks are striking; the hills dark, and dells woody and watery, winding up them in ways of sequestered coolness.

Minehead sends two members to parliament, and this has been the cause of its decline. The borough belongs to Luttrell, and he manages it with ease proportioned to its poverty and depopulation. Thus the market price of seats being the same, Old Sarum is the most advantageous to its possessor. Luttrell, therefore, has opposed with power every thing which might encourage the trade of the town; he has suffered his houses to fall to ruin and renews no leases. A woollen manufacture was to have been established here; this he prevented; and this roused up a spirit of opposition. A candidate started against him last election; he bought the only piece of ground buyable, run up houses there, built little tenements for the poor, gave away his money, and carried his election. Both parties are now struggling against the next trial. The royalty is Luttrell's, and so tyrannical is this man that he has imprisoned some masters of vessels who were not his friends, for taking the stones on the beach for ballast. Under this despotism Minehead is ruining,

and Watchet, from a different policy in the | track we went he did not point out. I thus lord of the soil, rising daily and becoming | lost the Danish encampment where Hubba prosperous by what this place looses. besieged Oddune. We past the spot where Kenwith Castle stood; but for which fortress and its gallant defender, the efforts of Alfred might perhaps have been vain, and the tide of our history have flowed in a different channel. From this place the descent to Lymouth begins, it runs upon the edge of a tremendous precipice and the sea at the base! a bank of from two to three feet is the only barrier. At the bottom, in a glen, lies Lymouth. We past through and ascended half a mile up the steepest of possible hills to Linton, where the public house is better than in the larger village below.

Thursday, Aug. 8. Cruckshank took me in his chair to Porlock, six miles. Hedges luxuriantly high for the most part impede the view, through their openings the dark hills are seen, and the coombs that intersect them. A Mr. Lee and Wilmot the Quaker, whom Lloyd and I travelled with to Salisbury, and admired so much, accompanied us. The day ended in rain; and my companions who (except W.) had intended to proceed to Lymouth with me returned. I am, therefore, alone; but instead of them I have a fire, and this employment is plea

sure.

Two rivers, each coming down a different coombe, and each descending so rapidly among huge stones as to foam like a long waterfall, join at Lymouth, and enter the sea immediately at their junction; and the roar of the sea forms with them but one sound. Of these coombes one is richly wooded, the other runs up between bare and stony hills; a fine eminence, Line Cliff, rises between them. Even without the sea this would be one of the finest scenes I ever be

Porlock lies in a vale. The hill which runs from Minehead here ends in one of the finest serrated headlands I ever saw. I looked back upon a horse-way which wound down a little cut in its side, and regretted that Cruckshank had deprived me of the walk. This place is called in the neighbourhood the End of the World. All beyond is inaccessible to carriage or even cart. A sort of sledge is used by the country people, resting upon two poles like cart-held; it is one of those delightful and imshafts. Mother Shipton prophesied that "Porlock Bay

Should old England betray :" and at every rumour of invasion her rhyme of evil omen is remembered here.

My candlestick is of ancient make and useful; half-way up is a broad circle of brass, like a dumb waiter, which serves to hold the snuffers. The bed room reminded me of Spain, two long, old, dark tables with benches, and an old chest, composed its furniture; but there was an oval looking-glass, a decent pot de chambre, and no fleas !

Friday 9. Two travellers arrived dripping wet the preceding night from Ilfracomb with a guide here, there was guide for me and a horse. The man was stupid. He conducted me over the hill instead of taking the road nearer the channel, where there are many noble scenes; and what there was remarkable in the barren, objectless

pressive places from which the eye turns to rest upon the minutest home object—a flower, a bank of moss, a stone covered with lichens.

From Linton an easy and little descent led me to the Valley of Stones. The range of hills here next the sea are completely stripped of their soil, the bones only of the earth remain: in the vale, stone upon stone is scattered, and the fern grows among them. Its origin I could not conjecture. Water to have overwhelmed such a height must have inundated all the lower country, a thing evidently impossible: and the hills on the other side the valley, not an arrow's flight distant, are clothed with herbage. A water spout perhaps; but I am, to my shame, no naturalist, and must hypothesize as a poet.

Was it the work of our giants, of the race of Albion? we have historical proof

that they were not large limbed enough, for Goemagog, one of the hugest of them, was not too big for Corineus to carry. I conceive it, therefore, being unable to trace any other inhabitants of Britain who possessed power enough for the wonder, to be the ruins of some work erected by the devils who concubinated with the fifty daughters of Diocletian; not that Diocletian who chose to lengthen his name of Diocles for the same reason that the inhabitants of Frog Lane in Bristol, in contempt of the original godfathers of the said Frog Lane, have genteelized it into Frogmore Street-but the Thracian king, and this diabolic origin accounts why the process of nature in clothing the rocks does not proceed here beyond a luxuriance of lichens.

On the summit of the highest point of the hill, two large stones inclining against each other form a portal; here I laid myself at length-a level platform of turf spread before me about two yards long, and then the eye fell immediately on the seaa giddy depth. After closing my eyes a minute, it was deeply impressive to open them upon the magnificent dreariness, and the precipice, and the sea. A Mr. Williams led me here in the morning; in the evening I came alone, and resigned myself to the solitude. This Mr. Williams is a natural son of the Duke of Gloucester.

The alehouse at Linton is bad. Mr. Lean was there and claimed acquaintance with me, because his son had met me at Bristol. He is a pleasant, intelligent man, and showed me where to walk. I learnt afterwards that he travels twice or thrice a year with a cartful of goods round Exmoor; and when he arrives at a village, it is proclaimed at the church door that Mr. Lean is come.

Saturday 10. To Ilfracombe five hours and a quarter; the distance variously computed from fifteen to eighteen miles. Two young sailors were my guides; and an acquaintance of theirs went part of the way. He caught a young lark, and it was quite distressing to see the parent bird fluttering

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about him. I pleaded for the poor prisoner, and he was released. We passed through Combmartin, an old, and dirty, and poor place; one house, once a good one, bears the date 1584; another is built in a most ridiculous castle style, and called the Pack of Cards. Near is Watermouth, a harbour not used, but strikingly beautiful, the one side formed by a peninsular rock running out parallel with the shore, with herbage on its summit-and a little islanded fragment at the end.

Similarly formed is the harbour at Ilfracombe, and much of the town stands on the peninsula. The shores are broken and fine, the country naked and dreary. To | Barnstaple is eleven miles; as you approach the town you have a fine view of the bay, and river, and town, of Biddeford on the right.

Sunday 11. A rainy day, and the devil himself dislikes walking in the wet, for it is written that he wandereth up and down in dry places. I went by stage to Taunton, in the coach were a daughter of Dr. Cullen, a woman unhappily ugly, a Scotchman, myself, and another young man of about my age, and like me in a white hat. I found him universally read, and an oriental scholar; he interested me, and told me if I came to Exmouth he should be glad to show me the place. Breakfast at South Molton, twelve miles; dinner at Tiverton, eighteen; Taunton, twenty-two. The Scotchman and I past the evening together; he chose theology for the subject of conversation, and exprest much surprise that I talked intelligibly and without anger: he gave me his address and a friendly invitation. Samuel Watson, Tanner, Ayr, Scotland.

Monday 12. Bishops Lediard five. Here I astonished my aunt Mary by breakfasting with her. Seven over Quantock to Stowey.

At Wellington I saw a very fine boy, about twelve years old, who lost both his legs by the severe cold last winter. At Linton, in a little shop window, I saw caricatures of the coalition. At Tiverton, the boiled beef

had an herb-stuffing which pleased me | place; there are persons here who always

much.

TUESDAY, Aug. 27. To Taunton twelve. To Honiton eighteen. At Honiton they put the Coleridges into a chaise with cart-horses. We were told that the towns-people there are remarkably dishonest, and have been so ever since the borough has been venal. On the road is one rich view over the vale of Taunton.

Wednesday 28. To Seaton twelve. A hilly and uninteresting road, for some miles over an open heath so luckily lonely that we found our trunk, which fell off some half mile before it was mist. At Seaton no lodgings were to be had. It is a high, open,❘ naked, Dorsetshire sort of country, with nothing to make me leave it with regret or remember it with pleasure. To St. Mary Ottery, twelve. The church here is very beautiful, the place itself remarkable as the birth-place of Gower, and Browne the Pastoral Poet, and Coleridge.

From Ottery I walked with S. T. Coleridge to Budley Salcombe; on the way we past the mansion of Sir Walter Raleigh. In Lord Rolle's park are the finest beeches I ever saw, one in particular which is quite dead, but in its ramifications even more beautiful than the summer trees; it branched into three great branches, one of which shot immediately into three smaller ones. The Otter enters the sea at Budley Salcombe. I forded it at its mouth. The scenery upon the river is tame and soothing; like all the Devonshire rivers it often overflows.

Also we went to Sidmouth, a nasty watering place, infested by lounging ladies, and full of footmen.

Monday, Sept. 2. To Exeter twelve.

Exeter is ancient and stinks. The cathedral looks well in those points where both towers are seen, and the body of the building only half. The bells rung for the surrender of the Dutch fleet. One church with two bells went ding dong, another had but one, and could only ding. It is a bigotted

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call the Americans the rebels. One great street, Fore Street, runs through the city, the rest is dirty lanes; as you cross the bridge you look down upon a town below you intersected by water in a strange way. The river Ex is fine, and the walks on its banks. There is a canal whose shores are completely naturalized, and most beautifully clothed with flowers.

Wednesday, Sept. 11. Coleridge and I set out to Moreton, for about seven miles the way was hilly and heavy. We then crost the Teign by a beautiful old notched bridge, and ascended a woody hill rich in magnificent views of woods and the river below. It rained incessantly the last half of the way, and we rejoiced in expectation of the waterfall to-morrow. To Moreton twelve.

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Thursday. Through Bovey and Manniton, two beautiful villages, to Becky Fall. The stream falls among huge round stones, striking scene. But we were some hours too late for the rush after the rains; and waterfalls, unless they are Niagaras, usually disappoint. Mediocrity in a cataract is as bad as in poetry. Near this is Lustleigh Cleeve, a similar scene. Indeed the whole county repays a pilgrimage. touched upon Dart Moor, and passed very near Heiter Cliff, the highest point in the county,-a rocky summit, visible almost everywhere, and sometimes looking like a ruin. This we left on our right, descending into the vale. The road is intricate, and the directing posts of no use to a stranger, or little, for they are only marked with the initial letter of the town to which they point. One spot I remember with pleasure, and saw with delight, a little vale watered with a mill-stream, the circling hills high, and on one part deeply wooded, the vale sprinkled with fine old ashes, that seemed to have been spared by a man of taste when he rooted up a grove. The mill stood under the hill, a neat, comfortable habitation. A saw-pit was before it. There was just enough of man, and what there was, was in keeping. Ashburton twelve, a good town.

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