"THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL CARTED
AWAY."
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—The original phrase, of which the saying attributed to Southey by Mr. Leonard (Spectator, February 27th) is a modification, occurs in the poet's "Letters from England," by Don Manuel Espriella, This work, which was published in 1807, is a lively and graphic description of the country, and the customs, manners, politics, and religious sects of the , people at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Southey deplores the destruction of the Clifton rooks, and satirises the Bristolians in the following pungent paragraph :—
" The people of Bristol seem to sell everything that can be sold. They sold their cross—by what species of weight or measurement I know not—they sold their eagle by the pound, and here they are selling the sublime and beautiful by the boat- load."
Manby, the artist, a friend of Nelson, and the inventor of the rocket life-saving apparatus, in his " Beauties of Clifton," published in 1802, writing on the same subject, says: "The venerable majesty of this truly sublime wonder of nature is receiving daily insult and robbed of some ancient grace by the rude hand of mercenary labour." Some forty years later, Eagles, the " Sketcher " of Blackwood's, lamented the "fearful quarrying" on the Leigh Woods side of the Avon ; and from that time to the present, notwithstanding the protests of many lovers of sylvan scenery, the devasta- tion of these beautiful hanging-woods (chiefly caused by the cupidity of landowners and the exigencies of municipal trading) has gone on unchecked, and seems likely to continue.
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