A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.—II.

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Sin,—Lyme Regis is a precipitous place, and associated with pre- stock of literature, and the small cipitate people. Its principal street seems, as Miss Austen says, to hurry down into the water ; the cliffs in the neighbourhood —Switzerland and Holland—so little. It cannot be because the States in themselves are small. Florence in the middle-ages was are fertile in landslips ; indeed, much of the shore is now a lovely small, and yet what a literary history was hers ! Denmark is wilderness of crumbled cliff, overgrown with the finest sward, and small, yet she has a complete literature of her own, and two names ferns, and shrubs. It was at Lyme that Monmouth landed when at least of world-wide fame,—CEhlenschrager and Andersen. he hurried into his premature revolution ; and at Lyme that Romanism here is visibly much less Mariolatrous than in France Louisa Musgrove, in Miss Austen's novel, when intending to or Belgium. • The inscriptions on the tombstones in the quaint jump into the arms of Captain Wentworth, fell almost lifeless at the feet of Captain Benwick, and by consenting to console the latter cathedral churchyard speak almost invariably of Christ only. The way-side images are almost invariably crucifixes, not the Virgin for his recent grief, set the former free to return to his allegiance . and child. There was a time when nearly the whole literary to Anne Elliot. Macaulay speaks of the town as a "small knot of glory of Germany streamed forth from a petty Saxon duchy. The steep and narrow alleys, lying on a coast, wild, rocky, and beaten b case is the more remarkable as respects Holland and Switzerland, by a stormy sea,"—not, I think, a very happy description, for on that both have been the asylums of free thought for illustrious the whole, Lyme is contained in its single street, which, though exiles, and have been irradiated by foreign genius,—nay, have as steep as a street can be without spilling its inhabitants into through it exercised a powerful influence over other countries. the water, is wide, bright, and picturesque. I wonder where always be so in I do not, however, feel certain that it will exactly it was that Monmouth landed, drew his sword, and kneeled Switzerland. With the extraordinary advance which has been to thank God "for having preserved the friends of liberty and pure made in popular education, and the pride which the Swiss take religion from the perils of the sea," before "leading them over the in their schools, and—the Ziirichers at least—in their University, cliffs into the town." It can hardly have been on the side of Pinney, ripavelty

it appears impossible that any Swiss village Milton can henceforth for the cliffs there are too steep. Can it have been in�SFlit lie_ remain mute and inglorious, and it is difficult to believe that a Charmouth, where the Char bends and wriggles about till it can find a channel through the shelving and mounded beach into the country so splendid should have no men of real genius to bring

forth. French-Switzerland, moreover, has already made its mark sea, and where a great break in the line of cliffs opens out the green uplands and wooded slopes of Wootton, through which the pretty in literature, out of which the name of Rousseau can never drop ; and in our own times, Vinet and Secretan, Topffer, Madame de stream bubbles away so pleasantly? I wonder why Monmouth did Gasparin, and Victor Cherbnliez have held a worthy place among not land at the Cobb itself, which, according to Macaulay, is as old

the writers of the day. as the Plantagenets, though since Monmouth's time, and even, I take it, since Miss Austen's, that picturesquely curving break- Rigi-StaffeL—This is really a pleasant little place, far prefer- water has been rendered considerably more solid and convenient. able, I should say, to either Rigi-Kulm or Rigi-Kaltbad for any Perhaps he wanted to marshal his men before he tried the temper lengthened stay. One gets tired after a time of a merely panoramic of the town, enthusiastic as it is said to have been in his cause. view, and the green valley and green hills in the foreground, For us, we did not turn a single thought on Monmouth and his ill- stretching up to the snow-mountains yonder, give a constant fated precipitateness; we were thinking too much of that other bit loveableness to the scene. of precipitateness, belonging to the realm of fiction, instead of that Although the Times and Daily News regularly scale these heights of history, and therefore so much easier to realise, invented by the during the season, we are here curiously indifferent to politics. skilful novelist, not only for the purpose of smoothing the way The great events of the day, in three languages, are the going up to her pleasantest heroine's happiness, but also in order to set off or coming down of the railway cars, empty or full, between the mild and pensive beauty of that heroine's certainly not too Vitznau or Arth and the 'Calm ; the comparative fullness of the impetuous character. Were we, perhaps, in the very room where Various Rigi hotels ; the reported bad fare of the Kaltbad ; the the Uppercross party's merriment attracted the envy of Mr. Elliot storm which last week blew in the windows at Fiist ; last, and I —the unknown and unknowing cousin—as be sat alone, wishing he am afraid, to almost all but the newest comers least, the sun. Poor

had any excuse for making their acquaintance? Here, at any rate, old Sun! we have all read in George Eliot of Mrs. Poyser's cock, as we turned the corner of the street to the beach, was the very spot who thought the sun rose on purpose to hear him crow. I fear where Mr. Elliot's glance of admiration at Anne, as she returned it must be very difficult for Rigi hotel-keepers not to play uncon- glowing from her windy November morning's walk, revived Captain sciously the part of that cock. The sun has become a regular Wentworth's old ardour of feeling, and prepared the way for his part of their stock-in-trade. Sunrises and sunsets are for them return to his senses. Here, too, were the Assembly Rooms, which -really, not metaphorically, golden. A few wet or dull days soon the Musgrove party naturally found lifeless in November, and which empty their houses ; the report of a particularly bright morning appeared, as far as we could see, equally lifeless in August also. fills them again, till September passes by, and the splendid hotels Here, again, it was that Captain Benwick came flying by to fetch have to be left empty till next May, in charge perhaps of a man the surgeon for the insensible Louisa. And here, surely, close on

Mrs. Wentworth, that "too good, too excellent creature," as she familiar. So the other day at Kiissnacht the waitress quite shrugged her shoulders over the waiter's ignorance of French. is called by her lover in the soberly passionate language of the beginning of the century,—must, if still living, be eighty-seven this Lucerne again. —A custom, I find, prevails among the servants year, and her husband well on into the nineties, while even at the hotels and pensions here of migrating like the birds with Louisa, now Mrs. Benwick, if indeed her constitution has survived the season, though not with the same regularity. A servant-maid so long that shock which, long after her convalescence, made her

"start and wriggle like a young dabchick " whenever a door banged,—is at least fotirscore. Indeed, those small children who take such pleasure in finding all the possible ways of ascending and descending between the upper and lower Cobb can- not possibly be more nearly related to these antique heroines than as grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And if that rather common-place lady, who sits at the very end of the Cobb, gazing at the now discoloured and rising sea, is Mrs. Benwick's daughter, already past middle age, recalling the story of her mother's accident and the change it made in her destiny, there is in her certainly more of the solid Musgrove than of the romantic temperament of the father who loved to quote Byronic addresses to the dark blue waves. It is, indeed, but too certain that, if all the actors in that little tragi-comedy had been as real as they are easily realised, they would most likely before this have made their bow and final exeunt, like the woman to whose delicate genius they owe their curiously strong hold on our imaginations. We, unfortunately, had no similar adventures. Perhaps for us the time, even for Miss Austen's mild romance, is past. But when, in a glorious August night, we turned the corner where Anne Elliot's beauty gained the admiring glances of her cousin and Captain Wentworth, and were suddenly met full in the face by the "long glory" of the autumn moon shining down the sea, and little Billie gently waving his yellow tail,—itself apparently a sheaf of moonbeams,—stood studying the glittering line which terminated so picturesquely in himself, I know that admiring glances were bent upon him, which might well have rivalled the fervour of Mr. Elliot's or Captain Wentworth's glance at the heroine of " Persuasion." The genius of Landseer would have needed the aid of the genius of Turner properly to render the scene. A young friend of mine, an artist, who will yet make his power felt in the world of art, assures me that there can be no genuine picture without a " human interest " at the centre of it. 1Vould not a canine interest do? Certainly it seemed to me that that long shaft of light which led up to little Billie, was a fit subject for the grandest art.

There is tolerably gcad evidence that the scenery of Lyme had made more impression on Miss Austen's imagination than that of any other part of England known to her. She speaks of the wilderness of fern, and rock, and tree among the ruined cliffs be- tween Lyme and Pinney,—the great landslip beyond had not hap- pened in her time,—with something like rapture, a state of mind which, to her sober though vivid nature, was as rare as it must have been delightful. Indeed, those were not the days of populardevotion to natural beauty. Wordsworth was only beginning to educate the English imagination ; Ruskin was not yet ; and the religion of natural beauty was in its infancy; Miss Austen herself does not, I think, give us a single bit of fine scenery-painting in all her novels. But she does go out of her way for the space of a single page to indulge in a sort of reverie of delight over the loveliness of Lyme and its neighbourhood, though she does not describe it ; and I think she must have felt the latent poetrY in her so far stirred by the deep blue seas and crumbling cliffs of Lyme, as to make it seem to her a specially fit scene in which to place that final triumph of the affections over a cold and worldly prudence which is the subject of "Persuasion."

Our drive back to the edge of Dartmoor through East Devon- shire was full of beauty, though not beauty of the startling kind. Wide-based hills rising gently to a wooded summit ; deep green lanes, whose only fault was that they quite shut out the rich view ; limpid rivers, —the Axe, the Otter, and the Exe,—rippling in long zigzags through the richest pastUres and through fragrant woods of fir, strewn deep with the fir-needles of former years ; churches of that picturesque Devonshire and Somersetshire type —I don't know how to describe them architecturally—which gives to each its solid square tower, one of the four edges being re- placed by a minute round tower, running the whole height, while four little pinnacles surmount the whole; rich, grave sunsets, with crimson clouds reflecting and steeping in ideal beauty the shapes of the hills beneath, and sending right down to the horizon golden streamers which seemed like hopes escaped into the sky from some lofty imagination,—such hopes, perhaps, as were in Shelley's vision when he made it the attribute of a demigod,-

" To hope till hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates,"

—these were our enjoyments morning after morning, and evening after evening, as Phoebe Junior took us steadily and gently back to the edge of Dartmoor.

Wherever we went the people were the same,—gentle, dignified, not very full of life, always ready to oblige ; never volunteering help, but taking some pains to explain what you asked for, yet never anticipating a question or a want ; a people naturally gracious and high-bred, but certainly not agitated by that superficial interest in strangers which you see in so many parts of England. Our teamof dogs never, that I saw, excited a smile, though in many counties no one passes without pointing and laughing at them. If we had to ask our way, the women who were keeping house were always in the most retired part of their cottages, never in front or at the windows. Devonshire, as a rule, disapproves of eccentricity or enterprise. If we wanted to make our way across country by some unortho- dox cross-roads, the difficulties we found in obtaining the right directions were almost insuperable. The Devonshire men would not hear of your cutting off a corner by means of the smaller cross-lanes usually traversed only by the inhabitants of neigh- bouring villages. They would willingly have sent us back to the turnpike road, even when it would have involved retracing our steps for miles. The only way was to ask for the next village in our intended road, but the faultiness even of the Ordnance maps rendered that plan not always feasible. There was, however, an air of high-breeding even about the villagers. They did not stare. They did not wonder, except occasionally at the breast-band which we had substituted for a collar in Phoebe Junior's harness, an arrangement at which the ostlers occasionally expressed a well- bred surprise. And as were the men and women so were the dogs,—very gentle, very courteous, not at all boisterous, but certainly more numerous in proportion than the men. The human population of Devonshire is decidedly sparse, and 1 wonder how many of them pay the Dog-tax. Also the dogs seem more disposed to give an active welcome to strangers than the men. We were much pleased, on the whole, with the dogs of Devonshire, who had all the graciousness of their masters and more life. They had evidently been taught to control their first impulse0: "Bite, but hear me !" had appealed, as it always will, to their sense of shame. Even in their own farmyards they looked before they leaped, and therefore never leaped upon us. I am sorry to say they put our dogs to shame as regards manners. The canine civilisa- tion of Devonshire is as far above that of Surrey, as the age of bronze was ahead of the age of stone. The expression a dog- and-cat life' would have no meaning in Devonshire. In the Devonshire plains, at all events, the cats live as much out in the open air as dogs. They repose in the middle of the road. They expect no ill-bred assaults from passing dogs. Like the women in America, the cats of Devonshire take part in public business, and are not insulted. Even our dogs were more or less subdued to the temper they found prevailing. Little Billie,—a dog of great beauty, or as Cecilia generally introduces him, "a dog of whom I am justly proud, with large ears and a large tail,"—though he began his career in Devonshire by biting the minion of a dealer in photographs and works of fine-art in Exeter, was much softened down before he left, by the contagious courtesy of the local dogs, and he allowed several chambermaids to pat him without even uttering a growl, which is quite contrary to his wont. " Old Pup " or " Mobled Queen," as we sometimes call her, after Hecuba as described in Hamlet, from the frenzied aspect of her twisted and Medusa-like locks, who, if she has a weakness in the world, detests to be a mere spectator when food is being discussed, learned under the refining influence of the canine civilisation of Devonshire to sit tranquilly in a chair at a table d'hote at Lynton, and astonish the company by her aplomb and good-breeding. Evidently the dogs of Devonshire had " soothed her with their finer fancy," " touched

her with their lighter thought." Assuredly there is no county to my knowledge where you can get so much of the wild moorland grandeur with so little of the wild moorland manners,—so- little rough- ness and barbarism either in man or dog, as on the great moors of Devonshire. You meet everywhere men and dogs who have " set their face in many a solitary place, against the wind and open sky" ; but there is no hardness in their eye, as in Peter Bell's.

"In his whole figure and his mien

A savage character was seen ' Of mountains and of dreary moors,"

says Wordsworth. And I have seen this often in the Yorkshire cragsman and sheep-dog. But there was nothing of the kind in the shepherds and farmers, the mastiffs and the collies of Dart- moor or Exmoor.—Yours, &c., YOUR LAST YEAR'S CORRESPONDENT.