LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

• A DRIVE IN DEVONSHIRE.—IV.

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPICOTETOE:1

Sra,—As far as we have seen it, the only wasty and desolate part of Dartmoor,—the only part where there is no grandeur and no beauty, though much dreariness,—is that chosen with considerable fitness for the site of the great prison. As you approach Princetown from the Ashburton road the desolation begins, and as you leave it by the Tavistock road, it vanishes. The great sweeps of yellow gorse again relieve the eye, the finely-marked lines of hill and valley reappear, and the road as it zigzags down the slope of the first broad basin, accompanied by the telegraph posts and wires, would resemble greatly the road over the lower spurs of the Alps, —over the Arlberg, for instance, from the Lake of Constance to

the Tyrol,—but that the depth of the colours, the mingled heather and gorse which inlay it, give it an aspect of greater beauty and less wildness. About four or five miles from Princetown, we passed on our left one of the most curious of the granite piles which lend Dartmoor its air of solemn yet grotesque antiquity. The Sphinx rock is on the hill called Vixen Tor, the Devonshire world being clivided, I suppose, whether the likeness to the female fox or the Sphinx be greatest, —but from the Tavistock road the resemblance to the Egyptian Sphinx is most impressive. The face of the Sphinx is turned towards the north, on which she appears to gaze, "with the same earnest eyes, and the same sad, tranquil mien," on which Mr. Kinglake has so powerfully dis- coursed as belonging to her great Egyptian prototype. One never thinks of a Sphinx without thinking of Lord Beaconsfield, and at the present moment a Sphinx seated on Vixen Tor seems especially symbolic of that at once mysterious and mordant statesman. But thinking on Lord Beaconsfield and his Sphinx- like career, my mind wandered into a sudden emotion of surprise that the Jews, in their spasmodic fits of Egyptian idolatry, had not, instead of borrowing from Egypt the meaningless calf, rather taken the Sphinx, which at least appeals to those forebodings of a mysterious destiny of which life is so full, as well as presenting a distinct object to the imagination and the senses. Or may it possibly have been that in the later idolatries they did include the Sphinx,—that it was the Sphinx to which Ezekiel alludes when he tells us that after being brought in vision to Jerusalem, "to the door of the inner gate that looketh towardn the north," he saw at the entrance "the idol of jealousy which provoketh to jealousy,"—a passage which is usually explained as meaning, not that the idol in question represented jealousy, but that it was one which especially "rivalled God and provoked his jealousy." Certainly the image which " Eothen" describes as bearing such awful semblance of Deity," in that it watches " like a Provi- dence" over all the vicissitudes of races and generations, "with those same sad, earnest eyes, and the same tranquil mien ever- lasting," might well be described as rivalling God and provoking his jealousy in a sense in which golden calves, or even images of Baal and Astarte, could never have provoked it, because such an idol would have appealed to that adoration of mystery and serenity which is indissolubly blended with true religious awe. Assuredly even this rude and accidental resemblance to the Sphinx, fashioned in granite, as it gazed solemnly at us, as we drove along the side of the opposite hill, gave us a better glimpse into the possibility of the old idolatries than all the Pantheon of Greece, even if chiselled by Phidias himself, could have seaweed for us.

As Dartmoor has its reminder of Lord Beaconsfield, so it con.. tains too, very near to it, a reminder of his chief opponent, as he was pictured by that mordant wit. Coasting the moor northwards from Tavistock, we came upon that singular little "exhausted volcano,"—as the geologists regard it,—called Brent Tor, with the quaint little old church, called in the old Latin Chronicle St. Michael de Rupe, which stands in the green cup on its summit, which was once, I suppose, a glowing crater. The Tories, perhaps, would require that the church should have been swallowed up by the volcano, rather than erected upon its verdant crater, before they would accept the symbol for Mr. Gladstone ; but Mr. Gladstone himself would probably accept the figure as it is, as better expressing the drift and consequence of his policy. Certainly the perfect little cone of Brent or Burnt-out Tor, and the strange little church which stands in the crater at the top, like the cap in a saucer, are as striking after their fashion as Vixen Tor and its rude granite Sphinx themselves ; and the prospect from them is, as is fitting, if you accept the symbolic meanings, far grander,—a perfect panorama of tors springing out of the wild moor, with the blue range of Cornish hills stretching away into the far distance on the western horizon. Probably the Tories would add that the delicious mushrooms which grow in such profusion on the sides of Brent Tor add another characteristic feature to the symbol of the Liberal leader and his policy, but I doubt whether any- thing half as good grows on the aide of Vixen Tor, though I should expect that there might be found there unedible funguses in multitudes. Ah, those were indeed rare and delicate mushrooms, which dappled the sides of that fair green cone, with its heart of red jasper and volcanic ashes. The same afternoon we saw the beautiful cascade formed by the silver torrent of the Lyd as it winds and slides down a reddish rock, 110 feet in depth, which interrupts its course, the whole framed in the dark background of the pine-woods,—we saw the deep-set, narrow gorge, eighty feet in depth, over which, one midnight, when the bridge had been carried suddenly away, the horse of an unconscious messenger from Tavistock is said to have taken him at a bound, without his discovering till later what peril he had escaped ; but it was not till the skilful landlady of the Dartmoor inn brought us into the cosy chimney-corner of the spare kitchen in which she lodged us, with its shining dresser and its rambling cupboards, those marvellous mushrooms, toasted with a little dash of butter and pepper, that the perfect ideal of the tender-sublime rushed upon our imaginations. Surely that flavour had been maturing for centuries in the heart of the mighty mother. Like the silver thread down the great rock, that delicate stream of rare essences had descended from the primeval ages, to dash itself, in a moment of glosso.pharyngeal ecstacy, as Mr. Alexander Bain would say, against a twig of the ninth pair of nerves in our organisation ; and the result was that emotion of the tender-sublime on which I have descanted. Why has no one ever defined man as the mushroom-appreciating animal? " Phcebe Junior" delights in a carrot, and exults over an apple, but turn her out on the moors of her ancestors, and she would never be known to eat a mush- room, still less, even if she did, to recognise that strain of ethereal rapture which it strikes out of properly organised glosso- pharyngeal nerves.

Our Dartmoor journeyings were now virtually at an end. We drove the next day to Okeharnpton, the picturesque and quaint little town which Mr. Kingsley has so unjustly vilified as "an ugly, dirty, and stupid town, with which fallen man (by some strange perversity) has chosen to defile one of the loveliest sites in the pleasant land of Devon," and were wonderfully struck with its beauty, cleanliness, and charm. The bright stream over which you pass into its broad and plea- sant street is spanned by a pretty, antique bridge, at the side of whieh three broad steps are placed, for the girls who fill their pitchers with its water. This broad main street is broken after a while into two branches by the church, which is built right on to a little gabled shop two or three centuries old, while above the town towers the high moorland, and the magnificent pile of the ruined castle. What a world for the painter is that ruin,—here pyramids of mossy wall, from the topmost stones of which seedling oaks are starting up unconscious of their doom,—there the solid masonry of the banqueting-room, and the unroofed dungeons, no longer dark, and looking perfectly harmless, which must have been the witnesses of so much pining and so much dread. We had never seen in a ruin more impressive windows than still remained perfectly defined against the blue sky. The woods, too, amidst which it stands are magnificent, while the mountain stream of the West Ockment, running through a lovely ravine immediately at its base, separates it from the heights of Dartmoor. Of all the little towns which edge this delightful moor, Okehampton seemed to us far the most charming. Moreton-Hampstead, much bepraised by the guide- books, is common-place and even mean in the comparison. Here we left Dartmoor, putting Phcebe Junior in a horse-box, and taking train for Barnstaple, with a lovely crescent moon, over the higher curve of which a splendid planet hung, as it were, suspended, looking in at the window of our carriage as the train wound along.

From Barnstaple we drove over the lower spurs of Exmoor, —which I had a great desire to compare with Dartmoor,—to Simonsbath, which is, indeed, across the borders of Devonshire, and situated, like the farmhouse which is made the chief scene of Mr. Blackmore's story of "Lorna Doone," in Somersetshire. This was an anxious drive, for there was only one inn on the way, —against which we were warned, as a bad case of fever had just occurred there,—and the accommodation at the close was very doubtful. From a little village of rare beauty on the Devonshire side, disfigured by the hideous name of "Higher Knacker's Hole," the road mounted for many miles, passing over the spurs of Span Head, and leaving behind us the richest conceivable view of the estuary of the Taw, till at last we began to descend on the romantic valley of the Barle, where thick plantations of fir line the steep slopes of Exmoor, and the river itself, with the tributary streams by which it is fed, make a network of converging ravines of singular beauty. The clouds had been rising all day, and had we been unable to get shelter at Simonsbath our situation would have been uncomfortable, as Phcebe Junior had only obtained a slight refection of meal and water at the hands of a woman on the way, thereby making her nose so mealy that in the absence of any regular appliances, I had to wipe it with a superannuated pocket-handkerchief ; the rain was beginning, and the next inn was five miles off. Nor is the house at Simonsbath a regular inn. It is a house of entertainment, tolerated by Mr. Knight, on whose property it is, on condition that no beer or spirits are sold there, but with few rooms, which are often full. I We were lucky enough, however, to obtain rooms, as well as a I most hospitable reception, and found ourselves at once among the dramatis personm of "Lorna Doone." Our landlord's name

was Fry,—and like John Fry in "Lorna Doone," his hair

and beard were of a sandy red,—and his next neighbour, a farmer, was a Mr. Ridd or Redd, who must have been some relative of the giant hero of that tremendous tale. The weather became so broken that I could not verify the geography of "Lorna Doone," as I had hoped, and missed even the mysterious water-slide in the Badg- worthy river by which John Ridd first found his way into the robber's fastness. But while we were at Simonsbath, I found out the gully of Cloven Rocks, into which Carver Doone, after his

attempt to murder Lorna, was pursued by John Ridd mounted on Kickums, in the somewhat melodramatic catastrophe of the tale, and saw, I believe, the site of the Wizard's Slough, into which Carver Doone, tossing his arms wildly to heaven, was sucked up,

after his death-struggle. with his foe. Alas ! a great part of the gully of Cloven Rocks is now enclosed, and a good farm-house

stands at the entrance ; and the Wizard's Slough, though

still boggy enough, has, I suspect, been drained. But Exmoor is still singularly wild,—much wilder, I think, than its grander southern neighbour, for it is less broken into separate hills, and has more of the continuity and loneliness of a single stretch of moorland. The tortuous Berle, which is its southern boundary, is, I should think, as solitary a river as could be found in England, though pedestrians can now cross it at intervals of a mile or so by light plank bridges, supported on piles of moss- covered stones. Here and there it sinks into pools of great depth, such as that which has gained for the village the name of Simonsbath, a pool with which very tragic stories, both old and new, are associated. As we watched the sunset one evening over this romantic reach of the river, I thought we had never seen more inextricably mingled aspects of loveliness and eeriness. At first the sinking sun was softened by a haze which gave it the gentle lustre of intensely brilliant lamplight, which was reflected in the river at the bottom of the ravine, while a spot of more lurid red hung over the fir-woods on the bank opposite W. Then, as the sun sank, the clouds lifted a little, leaving a clear streak of gold and crimson sky, with heavily-frowning masses of cloud above, while the converging ravines grew darker and more ghostly, and even the cattle drew together as if for company. The close of some old rhetorical period of Macaulay's,—which runs, I think, thus,— " were it the wildest scene which ever Salvator peopled with outlaws, or the loveliest over which Claude ever poured the mellow effulgence of a setting sun,"—kept ringing in my ears, for the scene was the latter when we first began to watch it, and the former before we turned away.

I must not dwell upon the remainder of our journey. We drove across Exmoor to Lynton, and a wilder drive is hardly to be conceived ; indeed, it becomes exquisitely beautiful, as the sea at the mouth of the Bristol Channel begins to glisten behind the magnificent belts of purple heather which line the northern slopes of the moor. Descending into Lynton, even with the drag, was a work of difficulty to Phcebe Junior, for the carriage often seemed to be really hanging directly over her, so steep and even precipitous is the road. Later in the day, in a hired carriage, we dashed down the same road at a rate of astonishing rapidity, which seemed to us to be regulated more by the laws of falling bodies than by those of voluntary motion. Almost every one knows Lynton and Lynmouth—that beautiful pair of towns, the one hanging directly over the other, each of which not only supplements the other's beauty, but adds greatly to the other's charm,—so well that they need no description of mine. I think them the most lovely places in England, so various and contrasted are the kinds of beauty which the grand cliff-scenery and the wild, romantic glens, belonging equally to each, afford. It would be difficult to find nobler cliff-walks nearer than the cliffs of Moher on the coast of Clare, or the cliffs of Slieveleague on the coast of DonegaL It would not be easy to find more romantic glens and waterfalls nearer than the glens of Wicklow or of Westmoreland. Near Lynton and Lynmouth both are con- tained within the distance of a few minutes' walk. Moreover, the sea-view of Lynton has this great charm, that you not only have a magnificent range of cliffs beneath you, but a lovely distant shore—the south coast of Wales—bounding the prospect, of which just enough is seen to excite the fancy, and lend richness and depth to the shadows and lights on the horizon.

Our little journey was nearly at an end. On the day we left Lynton, after giving Phcebe Junior "a leader" up the stiff ascent of the foreland, I drove her through driving rain and a tempest of wind across Exmoor to Porlock, and just at the point

where the redoubtable John Ridd's father must have been murdered by Carver Doone, a danger of a milder kind awaited us. Phcebe Junior, treading delicately, like Agag,. the King of the Amalekites, down the red and stony slopes of that tremendous hill, turned her foot upon a stone, and could hardly use it at all for many minutes. We were more than a mile, and a very precipitous mile, from the town. The rain was falling heavily, though rainbow after rainbow spanned with low, flattened arches the lovely bay of Porlock, and steeped the grand headland before us in its soft colours; the dogs, dyed deep with the hue of the soil, which made them as rosy-fingered as Eos herself, barked disconsolately for shelter,—and I began to despair of getting the dear little horse to the inn. However, the sprain turned out only temporary, and in a few minutes she was able to move on without difficulty, though not quite without lameness, and both Porlock and Minehead were reached at last.

And then came the parting. Up to the last moment, I had half contemplated buying Phoebe Junior. But it was not possi- ble, without either shooting or selling an old horse which I had not the heart either to shoot or to sell, for any one who would buy her would certainly work her beyond her strength. Yet it was a great wrench to part with Phcebe Junior. We had never passed her stable without hearing a neigh of welcome. She had never fallen, and never but once shied, and never turned slow or sulky. Even "Old Caution," an admirable old horse, which we had used among the Yorkshire hills, though her superior in strength, was not at all her equal in docility and companionableness. It was a sad parting. We separated amidst the confusion of the elements at the railway-station on the beach at Minehead. The long breakers were rushing in, in lines of angry foam. The hurricane was blowing down the trees in the little boulevard which connects the station with the town, as Phcebe Junior, with that perfect aplomb which never de- serted her, entered her box to return to Exeter. Cecilia placed a roll of bread she had just purchased for her on the board before her, looked wistfully, like the hero of the "Sentimental Journey," at the little arrangement she had made, and gave a sigh. The porter closed the box, and we saw her no more. In anguish of heart, I burst out with the lamentation of the hero of 44 Locksley Hall,"— " Oh my Phcebe, slender-footed, oh my Phcebe, mine no more

Oh the dreary, dreary moorland! oh the barren, barren shore!"

And indeed she deserved our regrets. We had still our Nancy and our Blanche. But all hope of a pony as faultless as the trap, of durable tranquillity, of temperate trotting, was shut up in the box with Phcebe Junior. A stronger foot than hers carried back the chaise, when at length it arrived by the Great Western train. As quick an ear as hers watches for the kindly steps which bring the horses food or drink at night. But it is when to the ordinary traffic of the quiet country roads, succeeds the noisy glitter of the soldiers or volunteers who come to be reviewed on our se- cluded green, it is when the gigantic traction-engines that strike panic into our old Nancy's soul, threaten our new basket-work with destruction, that Cecilia misses the sobriety, the self-com- tnand, the perfect soundness of judgment, the perfect rectitude of intention, to which the history of our draft-horses furnishes no parallel, or furnishes a parallel in "Old Caution" alone.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

YOUR LAST YEAR'S CORRESPONDENT.

• pliS is going too far. Our graceless correspondent has not -only parodied the Poet Laureate, but paraphrased Lord Macaulay's eloquent tribute to Hampden as a patriot and a statesman in his panegyric on Phcebe Junior ; nay, he has substituted the name of an old Yorkshire horse for that of the Great Liberator of the United States and the Father of his people. But for an old and kin' dly feeling for our correspondent, which betrays us into 'weakness, we must have cancelled the latter part of this letter ; as it is, we cannot let its gross flippancy pass without severe rebuke.—En. Spectator.]