SOUTH-COAST SAUNTERINGS IN ENGLAND.

Having strolled about Torquay for some hours I proceeded to find out the Representative Man of Kent's Cavern, the geologist Pengelly, for the purpose of visiting under his guidance that now famous hole. The explorations of it are considered so important to Science that in order to escape all possibility of "sham fossils" the public are excluded, and no one can see the work-ited Mr. Pengelly I found him in great glee men, who are engaged in excavations from morning until night, except in the presence of Mr. Pengelly. The general public has little reason

tures that he and other geologists had met dur- "Does this book (the Bible) contain all you being their researches in the neighborhood, aris-lieve?" "Yes," he replied, "and a deal more!" ing chiefly from the horror which the country The English Universities have long since given clergymen had of them. A flint arrow acted up subjecting their professors to this species of on these divines as a red rag on a bull. On inquisition. It is, in fact, becoming more and one occasion he had visited a poor stone-break-more impossible to get really able men to acer, whom he found conversing with the parish cept positions at the thresholds of which they clergyman. When he showed the poor man a have to lay down their intellectual independflint arrow-head, and asked him if he had met ence. with such in his work, the parson raised his eyes and hands and rushed from the room. We sometimes fancy that the age in which Galileo vainly tried to persuade the Paduan professors to look through his telescope, which revealed the moons of Jupiter, has passed; but there are several places in Great Britain where that age survives. When Lord Rosse's great telescope was completed two religious fanatics managed to get near it, and were caught in the act of breaking one of its lenses with a stone. The efforts of some of the universities to keep out heresy have led to some amusing results. Once, when the Chair of Natural History at Edinburgh became vacant, it was proposed to invite Agassiz to accept it, but the proposition was voted down because the famous Swiss was regarded as a heretic. Professor Altmann, who received the election, was soon after entertained at a grand banquet by all the dignitaries of the city. After it he and his wife were told that they would, on the following Sabbath, be taken to the Kirk in state. Fancy the horror when the new Professor replied, "We are Unitarians, but are willing to go any where." Professor Blackie, too, of the same University, was asked:

The more I travel in England the more impatient I feel with our American forefathers for having taken these names of towns and places where they are real and characteristic, and applied them to others in America where they are as much out of place as primogeniture would be among our laws. It might be pardoned that they should call their first landing-place in New England after the last point they had touched in their mother-country; but to go on naming places Dartmouth, Exeter, and the like, when the Indians had already left for such natural and beautiful names, was too bad, especially as the Indians had so much to do with its foundation. There is no classic or other reason why Lord Dartmouth should have given his name to one of our chief colleges. Dartmouth here is really at the mouth of the River Dart, which darts like a silver-feathered arrow to the sea. And Exeter is on the River Exe, once Isca, where the Romans fixed their castra. Time has modulated Isca castra, or "Camp on the Isca," into Exeter. But what has an old town in New Hampshire (ecce iterum!) to do with the Exe and the Romans? Yet one can not help being curious to see the towns of Old England

which have managed to get namesakes in the New World, and I have reason to thank this curiosity for some of the exquisite scenes I saw on the River Dart.

A saunterer will find a day or two well spent in rambling from the bold hills under which Dartmouth nestles to where they stretch away to the heavy ground-swells of Dartmoor. This last place has an unusual interest for an American as the situation of the prison built for Frenchmen (1809), but destined to hold the 2500 American citizens whose imprisonment by Great Britain, to whom they refused service, exasperated the war of 1812. The prison covers thirty acres, and is fortified by high walls; it is entirely refitted, and used for convicts. In one of its rooms are pathetic inscriptions left by the French prisoners. In the old burial-ground rests the dust of hundreds of Americans, who perished under the harsh prison treatment of those days, and the malaria of the bogs. Only the grave of one of them is marked, and that one by an old piece of slate; on which, however, American eyes can see an unsettled account standing.

by fishing and from wrecks. His son Anthony told me that on one of these excursions his father engaged in conversation with a pious old woman, who, on being asked how they had been faring lately, replied that they "had found it hard to get along until the Lord in his mercy had sent them a wreck, from which they got a good lot!" Another story, for whose veracity my informant vouched, was that at a place called "Hope," where the breakers are hopelessly terrible, a Spanish ship went to pieces, and the only person who reached the shore alive was the chaplain. The people got around him and locked him up. They then went to the village and called on the Squire, and said that a ship had gone down, and the only man saved was a kind o' Jesuit. They didn't like the looks o' he, so they had locked him in a barn. And if the Squire would come down they were ready to set the dogs on the Jesuit fellow." The Squire went down, and only with difficulty could persuade them to release the poor half-drowned chaplain. This occurred within the present generation. They live on strange dishes, one of the most popular being a pie made of fish and apples mixed. The inhabitants of Dartmoor are not so brutal as those on the coast, but are more stupid. They are not so dangerous as the singularly untamed wilderness in which they live.

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This whole region is yet comparatively wild and unrecovered; the very winds seem to have caught the howl of the wolves that once infested it, as they sweep over the heath and moor. The wolves have not been so long gone, and there are still old moorlanders who claim vest- One can hardly imagine a drearier fate than ed rights in the peat and sod on account of the to lose one's way on these wilds at night, under services rendered by their ancestors in exterm- the perpetual drizzle which keeps its bogs and inating wild beasts. The sods are used for pools ever-ready graves for the wanderer; and building, and the peat for fuel, by the very prim- the many stories of such tragedies which one itive inhabitants of this wild region. Some of hears in the neighborhood might spring up these people may even yet be found who are as there naturally as the ferns. Nearly all of nearly savages as any to be found in England such were mere narratives of people found froz-which is saying a good deal. They are mix-en, drowned, and so on; but one which a feled of Cornish, Celtic, Saxon, and Briton, and low-traveler related to me has a touch of poetit is not impossible that the moor was originally settled by the outlaws of all these tribes; its legends, at least, are chiefly of the robbers of whom it was an ancient haunt. Their language is a formidable mixture of all the old dialects of Great Britain, and is unintelligible to any but themselves. Their dwellings look at a little distance like large mushrooms; they are built of sod, mud, peat, and loose stones, and thatched with straw and rushes. These the earth has gradually adopted, and the weather has made gray. The masses of dry mosses

and lichens on them have so accumulated and mingled that a stratum is formed worthy the geologist's attention. Some of the huts still keep as an inmate the shaggy little donkey who is the capitalist, or rich relation, of the family. The missionary has an unquestionable if not a hopeful field in this region.

Lately a little girl, being asked in a new Sunday-school for what end she was created, replied, "To carry dung to the field." Yet it is said that the people on the coast are much wilder. Archdeacon Froude, to whom allusion has been made, used to wander among the kuts of the shore-people who got their living

VOL. XXXVIII.-No. 223.-3

ry in it. In one of the villages on the verge of a wild heath a bell is rung every night between two and three o'clock. This custom has been followed for over three centuries. A gentleman who had lost his way on the heath on a very dark night was guided to the village by the sound of this bell, which was rung in the night for some unexplained reason; and in his will he bequeathed a sufficient sum to have that bell rung at the same hour of the night, that no future wanderer might want the guidance which rescued him.

I had while in Devonshire, and especially amidst its wilder spots, a constant feeling of being at the bottom of a sea, as indeed I was where the sea had once rolled. It was a feeling traceable to the continual recurrence of reedy and slimy vegetation; the red earth and bogs; the water-washed cavernous rocks, and others tall, like chimneys, their sides perforated and jagged from the action of water, and their tops smoothed as if they had risen just out of the water, but had been rounded by them; and especially the "tors," which may have been little islands, flowering green on those primal seas, but whose titanic stems of

rock the abated waters have revealed. I read the said gentlemen, with embroidered caps and in the book of an old philosopher that the bot-plumes of white feathers; two hundred Fintom of the sea is covered with forms exactly landers, clothed in beavers' skins, in black corresponding to those we see at the bottom armor, and with broadswords; fifty gentlemen, of the atmosphere, but all dwarfed. Forests and as many pages, to attend and support the of coral, miniature oaks, dwarf mountains and Prince's standard; fifty led horses, trained to volcanoes, human-like creatures, which we never war, with two grooms to each; two state coachsee, because they can not soar on fin-wings to es; the Prince on a white charger, in a comthe top of their watery atmosphere any more plete suit of armor, with white ostrich feathers than man can fly like his inferiors. Treeless in his helmet, and forty-two footmen running Dartmoor, with its "tors," its huts, and its by his side; two hundred gentlemen and pages swarming gipsies, would well enough confirm on horseback; three hundred Swiss guards this account. It has too, as if to rivet the im- armed with fusees; five hundred volunteers, with pression, a queer little forest of dwarf oaks, two led horses each; the Prince's guards, in which might be esteemed an eighth wonder of number six hundred, armed cap-a-pie. The the world. The pigmy oaks of "Wistman's rest of the army brought up the rear. They Wood" grow amidst blocks of granite on the had fifty wagons loaded with cash, and one bank of the Dart, and average eight feet in hundred and twenty pieces of cannon." height, never exceeding ten. They are evidently of extreme age, and their branches are enveloped in moss so thick as to make some limbs of the wrist's size a foot in diameter. In the very heart of the famous Druidical region, stretching up toward frowning giant "tors," one beholds what, with a more imaginative race, would have been accounted for by legends of some enchantment by which the pagan Druids were transformed into their sacred oaks, and the oaks stunted; a work for which the Cambrian Saint Cadoc was quite adequate, if the Welsh bards sing truly.

Dartmoor, though a park for a geologist, and a paradise for a stone-mason-having "enough rock to build all the cities in England," as some one reported-has little to reward the zoologist or the lover of flowers. The cotton-grass (Eriophorum) covers the bogs in summer, and at all times there are long tufts of rushes, from which the wind elicits a weird music, as from harpstrings. There are here swamps filled with the whortleberry and bilberry-both rare in England-foxglove, woodbine, golden-rod, wild thyme, digitalis; and now and then a knowing one may find the pyramidal orchis and the butterfly (Habenaria bifolia); and if the botanist be distinguished from the gatherer of flowers he will find many plants rarer than those I have named. There is a moor-hen, and the blackcock, which seem to be indigenous; but, like all other regions, this is chiefly indebted to the lark, which sheds its "noon-dew" on the for- ! lornest and fairest of them alike, with the impartiality of the All-Beautiful by whom its blissful strain was taught.

I stopped in Exeter only long enough to glance at its grand old cathedral. "There be divers fair streets in Exeter," writes old Leland; and although it is a very different city from the Exeter of Henry VIII.'s time, the compliment is still deserved. A fine broad street suggested its own fitness for the proud entry of the Prince of Orange, three days after his landing at Torbay. "The Earl of Macclesfield, with two hundred noblemen and gentlemen, on Flanders steeds, completely clothed in armor; two hundred negroes in attendance on

In 1112 William Warlewarst, one of the Normans who followed William I. to England, and who was by that monarch made the third Bishop of Exeter, laid the first stone of this grand cathedral. It was completed near the close of that century. A century later it was enlarged into its present imposing dimensions. The chief interest about Exeter is the cathedral, which, is grand as well as historical. It is a conglomerate of the various epochs through which it has passed, and is traced over with the records of the dynasties that have presided over it.

The Gothic front is inclosed between two massive Norman towers; and one feels in looking upon it that conqueror and conquered were overarched by a common majesty of religious faith. The Continental character preponderates, however, and the chief ornament is the fleur-de

of France, in which he showed that their finest architectural traits are traceable to the features of the houses of the people around them. Their most beautiful spires are but the up-raised elongated cottage-roofs; their most exquisite win

lis of the roof. Even Puritanism had taste | homes. He exhibited there some drawings he enough, when the soldiers of the Common- had made of several of the finest old cathedrals wealth occupied this cathedral, to spare some of its sweetest attractions, notably its finest stained window. They laid waste, however, the cloisters, and let the bishop's palace to a sugar-refiner, whose troughs and pans remained until it was repaired in 1821. The most im-dows are French dormer-windows; and the pressive thing, however, is its noble organ, one chief ornament is a kind of mail, evidently sugof the finest in England. One can almost al- gested by the tiles on the surrounding houses. ways hear it, as services are very frequent. But in these English cathedrals one finds at The choir of boys is exquisite. A gentleman every point a sharp contrast with the dismal of Exeter told me that he once knew the choir square huts in which the common people live ; to sing "Blest are the departed," from Spohr's and, indeed, the mansions of the wealthy, in "Last Judgment," with such pathos that the the cities, are still dismal and square boxes, great audience was thrilled, and the clergyman differing from the others only in the costliness was so much overcome with emotion that he of materials. At the time I was in Exeter the could not deliver his discourse. In the south people were especially hungry and surly on actower is the heaviest peal of bells in Great Brit-count of the unusually high prices of bread and ain. In the north tower is one of the largest bells in the country. It is named Peter Bell, and is used to strike the hours. Southey wrote in "The Doctor:" "There are, I believe, only two bells in England which are known by their Christian names, and they are both called Tom. ......Were I called upon to act as sponsor upon such an occasion I would name my bell Peter Bell, in honor of Mr. Wordsworth." Southey evidently did not know that the Exeter bell was named Peter Bell. It was so named, however, after a bishop, centuries before Wordsworth's wagoner was dreamed of. The two tional infirmity in that region from early times. "Toms" are at Lincoln and Oxford. The Exeter bell is five hundred pounds heavier than the former, and only inferior in weight and tongue to the latter.

meat, and the want of employment. The beautiful cathedral, looking down upon the hungry idlers around it, reminded one of the poor boy in Squeers's Dotheboys' Hall whose mother sent him a tract. If a man or woman starves here it will not be for want of tracts and churches. The Exeter people, however, concluded, a few weeks ago, that they could not live on spiritual any more than on material bread alone; and they smashed the windows of nearly every butcher's and baker's shop in the city. "Bread-rioting" has been a constitu

That which I found most interesting throughout Devonshire was the language, the superstitions, and the customs of the people. In the cities and towns, of course, the peculiarities of these have to a great extent disappeared before the all-invading genius of the nineteenth century-Steam. But in villages and rural districts one still meets with men and women whose minds dwell in the atmosphere, and who speak in the language, of the first century.

The women of Devonshire have a reputation for homeliness, which is due to Queen Elizabeth rather than to their physical demerits. The Queen named an award-a small homestead, I believe to every man that married an Exeter woman. Her grant was due to the ill effects on the woolen manufactures of the district, ow-The ethnologist can not get so much from the ing, as her advisers thought, to the preponderance of the female population—the men generally devoting themselves from early life to a sea-faring career-which caused the birth-rates to diminish. I was told that the ladies of the upper and middle classes in the city were good-in the Devonshire dialect, taken down by a lady looking enough; but certainly the people of the lower classes that I saw had the slovenly and coarse look which is noticeable in nearly all the cathedral towns of England.

Vice and brutality are the rank weeds that grow under the shadow of cathedrals in England. And one always feels, in seeing the filthy tenements, with their miserable occupants, which cluster about a great cathedral in England, that these grand buildings were never reared by the people around them. We do not need the Norman tower and the fleurde-lis to remind us that both the religion and its domes were imported. Mr. Ruskin, in his recent lectures at Manchester, assured the people that there could never be a noble English architecture until there were beautiful English

old English and Celtic chronicles as he can by mingling with these queer folk of Devonshire and Cornwall. And first, with regard to their speech, I am fortunately able to give the reader an exact idea of it by quoting from a dialogue

of the county. (It must not be confused, however, with the Cornish, which is as incommunicable as Chinese.) I will first give the specimens, and afterward explain the peculiar words employed.

RAB. "Well, Bet, wot'n go up to the Church town to rail an zee the wraxlin. Every body keep'th holi

day to-day; the crowder and a whole gubby; thee
shet dance for the cap."

BET. "I can't go, zure."
RAB. "Wull, very wull."
BET. "You be a-purt now."

RAB. "Fay! But I'm a-guest thee wot'n meend my
purting; but tell ma than why thee cast'n go."
BET. "Don't be so pettish, and I wol. Why I be
going to Shaleacott to zee my old gonmar."

RAB. "Won wot go? How long vurst ?" BET. "I can't tell tha; I've a gurt many chures, and here I be driling away my time."