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We find a trace, firstly, of the chief of poets and greatest name of all—Shakespeare—in the municipal records of Barnstaple, where under the date 1605 an entry records: "Geven to the Kynges players being in the town this year xs." That is all, and Shakespeare is not named; but we know that he was associated with the Kynges Players for many years, and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, who is a well-known authority on this subject, asserts that at this date Shakespeare was still one of the company. It is a shadowy trace enough, but in view of the bare outlines of the life and death of this man, whose name is almost universal and whose history is almost completely obscure, we seize on any tiny fact that may help to bring before us so wonderful a personality. That Shakespeare was in Barnstaple, went up and down Boutport Street, the old street that half encircles the town, running "about the port," that he acted here, lodged here, if only for a week or two, talked in the tavern and walked in the old town, with that observant inner eye which noted the veriest detail of life, the swing of a flower, the swallow under the eaves, the idiosyncrasy of dress or gesture in the passers-by, and at the same time comprehended and recorded the springs of action, the fumbling thoughts, the consciences, the strivings, and the pretences, of the world of men and women that moved around him—that Shakespeare was, once in his short and wonderful life, actually in Barnstaple gives even to the most unreflective an interest and a romance to this town.

It was near Barnstaple, also, and during Shakespeare's lifetime, that Thomas Westcote, gentleman, was born at Westcote, in the parish of Marwood, in 1567. He wrote, towards the end of his life, a description of the country called "A View of Devon," and a genealogy of the principal families. It was not published until 1845, but is well worthy of being preserved, not only for its antiquarian interest, as being the earliest account of Devonshire, its agriculture and its industries, but also for the pleasure of its quaint turns of phrase, the ponderous classic authorities which he marshals to support a simple fact—and there are indeed some strange wild-fowl among his authorities—and above all for a gentle and unobtrusive humour which seasons all the narrative. Westcote gives a list of the fish afforded by the Devon seas (a very imperfect list by modern computation), and adds:

"It might be much more enlarged, but your server shall stand no longer at the dresser, lest the first dish be stale ere the last come to the table. Yet, notwithstanding, I will here confess that had you supped with Aulus Gellius, the Roman Emperor, you might say my bill came much too short; yea! by 1800; for as Suetonius, in lib. 9, and Josephus, lib. 5, alledge, he was served at one meal with 2,000; (if you please to believe there are so many species of fish;) but he had indeed a large country to make his provision in, the whole then known world. … But for the other supper of 7,000 divers kinds of fowls, I will not undertake to name them here, nor in Africa, and Asia, with all the assistance that Gesnerus can afford me."

This is a style without hurry, indeed, in a peaceable rambling world, and one can imagine Westcote, with his pointed beard and his tall hat of the fashion of James I., taking a little walk in the afternoon sun after having spent the morning with his quill-pen and his calf-bound, close-printed classics—Suetonius, and Gesnerus, and Diodorus Siculus. His book is interspersed with little rhymes, couplets or longer verses, in the style of the "Arabian Nights" stories, and which George Meredith in the "Shaving of Shagpat" has used with such quaint effect; on every subject and for every statement Westcote has an authority and an aphorism, whether it is of "Day labourers in Tin-works, and Hirelings in Husbandry," of fishermen or merchantmen, of trade or agriculture—"for, as Horace speaketh," says he,

"Who much do crave, of much have need;

But well is he whom God indeed,

Though with a sparing hand, doth feed."

Or again, speaking of "the commodities this country yields":

"England hath store of bridges, hills, and wool,

Of churches, wells, and women beautiful."

He is no mere antiquarian, however, and quotes Chaucer and Robert of Gloucester as well as Theocritus and Horace; he is seriously perturbed at the decline of agriculture in Devonshire; in spite of the fertility of the soil, he says, it yields insufficience of bread, beer, and victual, to feed itself, for which the country has to have recourse to Wales or Ireland, so much so that in 1610 there was 60,000 pounds of corn brought into one harbour alone. The reason for this is the increase in trades, so that … "the meanest sort of people will now rather place their children to some of these mechanical trades than to husbandry"; in spite, also, of the almost sacred character of husbandry, which was clearly recognized in "elder times," so that even the rudest and most savage peoples respected ploughmen and tillers of the soil in time of war. He then quotes some melancholy verses of Virgil, and gives the whole chapter a twist of humour by ending up with—"But not a word of this in any case, especially that I told you so; and we will proceed to the next and speak of mines."

I will also "proceed to the next," and speak of Bishop Jewel, a fellow-countryman of Westcote's, and one about whom he speaks in the highest praise: "a perfect rich gem and true jewel indeed … so that if anywhere the observation of Chrysostom be true, that there lies a great hidden treasure in names, surely it may rightly be said to be here: grace in John, and eminent perfection in jewel."

John Jewel was born at Berrynarbor, near Ilfracombe, in 1522; he went to Merton College, Oxford, where he had for tutor John Parkhurst, under whom he early acquired a bent towards Protestantism. After the accession of Mary he allowed himself, in a moment of weakness, to sign an adherence to the Romish faith, but his recantation weighed upon his conscience, he fled to the Continent, and there publicly withdrew it. In the reign of Elizabeth he returned to England, and was one of the Protestant doctors chosen to dispute before her at Westminster with a like number of Catholic divines. He became Bishop of Salisbury in 1560, and held that office till his death in 1571. His chief work was an "Apology for the Anglican Church"; and his chief opponent was Thomas Harding, who was born at Comb Martin, the next parish, and who, like Jewel, went to the grammar-school at Barnstaple in his early boyhood, so that they were near neighbours and dear enemies. "As I cannot well take a hair from your lying beard, so I wish I could pluck malice from your blasphemous heart," says Harding to Jewel, in that savage personal invective that religious controversialists have permitted themselves in all ages. Jewel does not seem ever to have answered in this unworthy strain, and the singular purity of his life, the sincerity of his opinions, and a certain lovable quality to which all his contemporaries bear witness, gave even his political adversaries a personal attachment to him. "I should love thee, Jewel, wert thou not a Zwinglian," cries one. "In thy faith thou art a heretic, but sure in the life thou art an angel"—surely the most splendid tribute that a man can have, when we consider the bitterness and animosity bred by a difference of religious belief. To all who loved him—and it seems to have been his whole generation—his name gave the opportunity of affectionate puns, quips, and little epigrams; to Queen Elizabeth he was "my Jewel," and the epitaph Westcote makes upon him is that of St. Gregory upon St. Basil: "His words were thunder, and his life lightning," and his memory "a fragrant sweet-smelling odour, blown abroad … throughout the whole kingdom."

We may find a lingering trace at Barnstaple, also, before going farther north, of another eager spirit and earnest reformer, Shelley, whose gift of poetry we accept, and whose quick courage we profit by, in a world of thought where we breathe a little freer because of his efforts and ideals, while we still despise or half shamefacedly apologize for the strivings and struggles of his life. He prevailed upon Syle, a printer of Barnstaple, to publish his "Letter to Lord Ellenborough," which was in effect a violent and heated attack upon this Judge for the sentence he had passed on the publisher of Tom Paine's "Age of Reason," which was considered by Lord Ellenborough and that generation as a dangerous and revolutionary document, subversive of the political morals of the world. Those were the days of the French Revolution, and it seemed to many, as honest as Shelley, that the whole social fabric was threatening to crumble before the rising flood of anarchy, bloodshed, and disorder. Syle was prevailed upon to withdraw the greater number of copies—it speaks much for his courage and convictions that he ever published it—and Shelley found it advisable to leave Devon.

For Shelley had been living at Lynton during the early days of his ill-fated first marriage with the Harriet; the cottage where they lived can still be seen, though much altered and modernized since the unhappy young man and woman tried to work out together a means of right living and mutual happiness, and made so tragic a failure of it.

It was to Lynton, too, that Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge, came on a visit, and were so ravished by the beauty of the place that they were nearly decided to settle here, and might have founded a school of Devon poets instead of Lake poets. It was at Lynton, also, that "The Ancient Mariner" was planned, to pay for the expenses of the holiday, and was begun by Wordsworth and Coleridge together, though there is actually very little of Wordsworth's work in it, and the spirit of it, the air of mystery and the sense of brooding elemental forces with which its simplest lines are somehow invested, belongs to Coleridge alone, and to that strange genius of his, which only twice or thrice in his life—in "Christabel," "The Ancient Mariner," and "Kubla Khan"—produced poetry of inimitable, strange beauty and wonder.

If Lynton is beautiful now, with its new houses and hotels, and that air of snugness that prosperity gives to places and persons, the poetic appeal of its loveliness to Wordsworth and Coleridge can be well imagined when only the low-browed, thatched little cottages clung to the steep cliff-paths and clustered round the small harbour, and from the surrounding heights and hills one looked down upon nothing but green valleys, and from the valleys one looked up to the bare cliffs and crags.

Southey also was drawn to this corner of England by the fame of its beauty; on one occasion, when walking across Exmoor, he was driven to take refuge at Porlock from the heavy rain, and visitors to the Ship Inn are still shown the corner by the wide old fireplace where the poet, presumably, dried his knees and wrote the ode which begins with the following inadequate description:

"Porlock, thy verdant vale, so fair to sight,

Thy lofty hills, with fern and furze so brown,

Thy waters that so musical roll down

Thy woody glens, the traveller with delight

Recalls to memory, and the channel grey

Circling it, surging in thy level bay."

Then, George Eliot and Lewes discovered this north-west coast, and came to Ilfracombe, with which they were delighted; and the unconventional lady, with her broad-brimmed straw hat tied under her chin (in the days when people wore bonnets), was soon a familiar enough figure, to be seen scrambling over the rocks of the bay which is haunted by the spirit of Tracy, or looking for seaweed and anemones in the clear rock-pools at low-tide. Ilfracombe then, in the middle of the last century, kept much of its original character as a seaport of importance, which in its day had sent representatives to a shipping council in the fourteenth century, had contributed six ships towards the Siege of Calais—at a time when Liverpool was only of sufficient size to send one—and had had enough strategical value to be the scene of a projected French invasion under Napoleon. Already Ilfracombe was beginning to be, however, what it now is pre-eminently, a "holiday resort." It was patronized by royalty, and, following royalty, by "the aristocracy and military," who came to enjoy the "overwhelming charms" Nature poured forth here "with a tremendous and prolific grandeur which we shall not pretend to describe," as Mr. Cornish mellifluously exclaims in his "Rise and Progress of the Towns in North Devon." In the seventies the present German Emperor, then Prince William of Prussia, was sent here with his tutors; and there is a story, preserved with great pride, of a fight on the beach between him and a bathing-machine boy, at whose father's property the Prince was throwing stones. An account of this historic battle is preserved in a doggerel ballad, printed and sold locally, and composed Heaven knows where, which is called "Tapping the War-Lord's Claret: Why Kaiser Bill hates England."

"When Kaiser Will'um was a y'uth

He com'd t' Combe one day,

And at the big hotel out there

He stopped on holiday. … "

He went bathing in Rapparee Cove, and when his tutors were out of sight began blazing at the numbers on the boxes, though warned by "young Alfie Price" not to; and after a wordy altercation the Kaiser knocked down Alfie, who got up and went for him "just like a Devon bull."

"He knacked the Kaiser on the nose,

And tapped the ry'al blid. … "

The tutors came up and intervened, and Alf was given thirty shillings to keep the matter quiet; but Kaiser Bill swore implacable hate of the English, because of the affront, built his Dreadnoughts and drilled his army to avenge the insult of Rapparee Cove upon the English nation.

Local publications are always, I think, of some interest, even when they are as rough and simple a doggerel as the above; and there are two magazines, printed and published at Barnstaple in the early years of the nineteenth century, and which may be seen in the Athenaeum Library of the town. They are the Lundy Review and The Cave, and they contain stories, poetry, puns, epigrams, acrostics, all with the mild, faint flavour of a curate's tea-party in a cathedral town, and yet invested with a kind of charm by the old-fashioned type, the yellowing paper, and a small, dim picture—like the images of ourselves and our furniture which we see in those old, round, diminishing mirrors—of the life of a century ago. There is poetry of the Lake School fashion, exhortations to Bideford and Woody Bay, to Lynton or "The Beauties of Devon"; there is more poetry of the Byronic fashion, fierce and satiric invective (yet never, be it understood, transgressing the bounds of decency or good manners!) against the lady of the poet's affection; there are stories, in which love and virtue triumph over temptation and evil-doing; there is, of course, at least one story of a blind girl, and one of a consumptive; there is much harmless punning, and in the acrostics which the ladies of 1820 so much loved are fantastically woven the names of the handsome young women of Barnstaple whose only other record is now upon a tombstone.

There is a strong tone of "patriotism," if by that we mean a dignified contempt for foreign manners and customs, foreign thought and foreign speech. I call to mind one article, where the writer is good-humouredly but supremely contemptuous of the French, because of their manner of pronouncing classical names. What can you expect of a nation, says he, for whom Titus Livy is no better than a "tom-tit-liv-ing" in a hedge, and Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor philosopher, becomes "Mark O'Rail," a mere beggerly, abusive Irishman?

This insularity of ours, which appears in a comic aspect in this article in The Cave, continued throughout the nineteenth century, and withstood the shock of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny without apparently being in any way shaken; it is breaking now, indeed, under the humiliations of the South African War, when we were made to feel our isolation in Europe, and under the stress of this greatest war of all, when at last we feel and say that we are proud to stand with the nations of the Continent in a common cause.

But, in the nineteenth century, not only was our insular prejudice extreme, but there was a pride in our very prejudice, which made it seem hopelessly fixed and stultified. There is a trail of it through all but the greatest writings of that time, Tennyson was not without it, Charles Kingsley, Froude. … To the novel it became actually a stock-in-trade, and as such it was used by Henry Kingsley in his novel of "Ravenshoe." He was a younger brother of Charles, and his life was as restless and adventurous as a novel. He was, besides being an author, an explorer to the Australian goldfields—from which he came back rich in observation of men and manners, but without having made a pecuniary fortune—the editor of a paper, the Edinburgh Daily Review, and a correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War. He was a prolific and too hasty writer, but his novel of "Ravenshoe," whose scene is principally laid on the northern strip of Somerset coast, bordering the Bristol Channel, and which was his own favourite among his works, is considered by many critics to reach a high level, and to stand comparison with the work of his more famous brother. In the Academy of 1901 the following tribute to the book appeared under the initials C.K.B.: "I first read 'Ravenshoe' at that period when absolute romance and absolute fact have to live together; and very turbulent partners they make. The appeal of the book was instant and permanent. Even now, after a dozen years I cannot read the story unmoved. … Each point holds me of old, by sheer force of its human presentation, its resourceful dialogue, its unwearied vitality."

I first read "Ravenshoe" in this year of 1917, and to me the world seems to have travelled so far since its publication in 1862, that its aims, its ideals, and its point of view, are hardly credible. Through it all runs that facile spirit of optimism which seems to me to have distinguished much of the thought of the mid-Victorian era, that air of "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds," that insular pride of which I have been speaking, but which to us now appears the narrowest and worst form of parochialism, a certainty that English beef, English beer, English morals, and English standards, were the ultimate excellence towards which a world of misguided foreigners might ultimately aspire, that self-satisfaction, different from pride, that glorying in prejudice, and wilful blindness to all features of national life which do not bear out the theory of an earthly paradise. "Tell me one thing, Lord Saltire; you have travelled in many countries. Is there any land, east or west, that can give us what this dear old England does—settled order, in which each man knows his place and his duties? It is so easy to be good in England."

"Well, no. It is the first country in the world. A few bad harvests would make a hell of it, though."

This was written at a time, remember, when the invention of machinery, the rapid growth of industrialism, and the increasing mobility of the population of the world, had broken down the old order of things, had created large fortunes and reduced thousands to destitution; when men poured into cities and lived crowded and unhealthy in slums, when the opening phase of the grim battle between employer and employed was fought, when trade-unionism was wrested from an unwilling Government, when housing regulations, health regulations, and poor-laws, were incapable of dealing with the wars of misery, poverty, and sickness, they were designed to meet, when little by little vested interests and class prejudices were brought before the judgment of reason and found wanting—it was in such a period of our national history that Harry Kingsley could write of "settled order, in which each one knows his place and his duties."

This attitude of mind is characteristic of a whole school of mid-Victorian novelists, and George Meredith—whose earliest novel, "Richard Feverel," was published about this date—broke many a lance against it, and scolded us and laughed at us, and upset our dignified conception of ourselves, and sometimes, in his irritable affection for his countrymen, took a bludgeon to us, and broke our heads.

I find it also in another and much greater novel, to attack which in a book dealing with this corner of Devon and Somerset is indeed a sort of lèse-majesté—for, to most people, who says "Exmoor" says "Lorna Doone."

Yet rereading the book in these present days—and even amid the scenes whose beauty and whose character Blackmore has so firmly reproduced—I find the parochialism, the self-satisfaction, and the prejudice, which lumps the whole un-English world, with its revolutions, and ideals, and racial problems, under one heading, as "dam-furriners." John Ridd is English, therefore he despises what is not English; he is rather stupid, therefore he despises intellect. "She was born next day with more mind than body—the worst thing that can befall a man," he says of his sister Eliza. He is a man, so, at the last stage of self-satisfaction, he despises what is not man—woman. "Now I spoke gently to Lorna, seeing how much she had been tried; and I praised her for her courage, in not having run away, when she was so unable; and my darling was pleased with this. … But you may take this as a general rule, that a woman likes praise from the man she loves, and cannot stop always to balance it." "But he led me aside in the course of the evening, and told me all about it; saying that I knew, as well as he did, that it was not women's business. … Herein I quite agreed with him, because I always think that women, of whatever mind, are best when least they meddle with things that appertain to men." As the matter under discussion was a question of their all having their throats cut by the Doones, and the farm being burnt over their heads, it seems to us to have been, at least in some slight degree, the women's business.

The hero of "Ravenshoe," Charles, is of the same type, though not drawn with the firmness of touch with which Blackmore depicts John Ridd, and which makes him indeed a living personality to us, even if one to quarrel with.

Charles Ravenshoe is of the type which for many years we have striven to present to the contemplation of the outside world as the perfect Englishman. He is a bluff, hearty fellow, without serious vices, without, also, serious virtues; he has, of course, a perfect self-satisfaction, and a deep and unconscious selfishness, tempered by an easy good-nature and a superficial benevolence, of wishing to get on well with everybody, and to see everybody round him comfortable. He is without ideals or spiritual aims, and has a contemptuous tolerance for them, as in the case of his brother Cuthbert, who is deeply religious and desirous of entering a monastery, and yet is held by the temptations of the world, so that his mind is a continual striving and renunciation. Charles's relationship with the lady of his choice may be gauged by the following: "How is Adelaide?" asks his adopted sister. "Adelaide is all that the fondest lover could desire," he answers. Did the Englishmen of the nineteenth century really talk like that about their dearest and most intimate affairs?

And yet here is John Ridd, the accepted lover of Lorna, an honest, clumsy, self-satisfied couple of yards of a man, for whom she has to be properly grateful in a world of villains, and yet, for my part, I can never look upon her marriage with him as other than a mésalliance.

Of course, it must be understood, even by those who most violently disagree with me, that these strictures are passed, not upon Blackmore's novel, but upon the spirit of the age which made John Ridd the hero of such a novel, the spirit which in the dress of "John Bull" has insistently presented our less attractive qualities to the outside world as the true Englishman, and which has been, by the outside world, adopted and disliked; while such admirable traits as sincerity, disinterestedness, and self-criticism, have been neglected by us and ignored by them.

For the novel itself it is difficult to have anything but praise. The admirable sense of locality, and the art with which Blackmore has so identified his persons of fiction with actual places till we no longer disassociate them, but in the church of Oare, or the Doone Valley, or Porlock, or Badgeworthy Water, think and speak of Lorna and John Kidd as if they had had an actual existence; the firm and lively drawing of the lesser characters, the charming pastoral scenes of the life on the Ridds' farm, the really magnificent descriptions of the scenery of Exmoor, and a particular gift of narrative, all place this novel of Blackmore's on a high level in the literature of the nineteenth century. His other novel, of which the scene is laid on this coast, is "The Maid of Sker," less well known and of less artistic weight, but of interest to anyone visiting the country between Barnstaple and Lynton, and containing a particularly vivid account of old Barnstaple Fair.