Minehead presents the cheerful appearance of a town rising from its ruins. New houses built and building every where, give a lively and clean appearance to it. The quay is ugly, but the view very striking along the indented coast towards Stowey. A circular eminence in the grounds at Dunster, with a building on its summit like a Tor, amidst wood, stands near the water. To the right, there is neither view nor passage; the quay blocks up the way. The Holms look well from hence; the water had even a bluishness; it was low, and therefore, I imagine, clearer; but the opposite shore was visible, and destroyed the im- | mensity which makes sea views so impressively magnificent. From a hill on our way here we had one glorious burst of prospect. The sun fell on the sea through a mist, and on the crags of the shore they looked like a glittering faery fabric; the very muddiness of the water mellowed the splendour, and made it more rich and beautiful.

Half way up the hill, where the church stands, is the upper town, quite cut off from the lower, and perhaps containing more houses. Indeed, Minehead is like the Trinity, three; and these three are one: for the upper, and lower towns, and the quay, are all separated from each other by houseless lanes. The upper town is beyond any thing narrow, dirty, and poor; completely a lousy looking place. I never elsewhere saw so many houses in ruins, and that at such distant intervals as evidently not to have been destroyed by the fire. In the fire one life only was lost, a madman about |

me.

Imagine a range of high hills (not mountains) covered with fern and furze, and the Channel at their foot, and you will have the features of this neighbourhood. I toiled up a long, long, very long ascent above the church; and when I reached the top, half trembled to see the sea immediately below The descent, however, though to the eye directly abrupt, was not precipitous. A path shelves along, sufficiently fearful to produce an emotion of pleasurable dread; yet perfectly safe, for almost in every part it would be practicable to walk to the beach. The descent is all furze and fern. In a clear day the houses on the opposite shore are distinct; but in hazy weather the view is finer, like the prospects of human life, because its termination is concealed.

The inland walks are striking; the hills dark, and dells woody and watery, winding up them in ways of sequestered coolness.

Minehead sends two members to parliament, and this has been the cause of its decline. The borough belongs to Luttrell, and he manages it with ease proportioned to its poverty and depopulation. Thus the market price of seats being the same, Old Sarum is the most advantageous to its possessor. Luttrell, therefore, has opposed with power every thing which might encourage the trade of the town; he has suffered his houses to fall to ruin and renews no leases. A woollen manufacture was to have been established here; this he prevented; and this roused up a spirit of opposition. A candidate started against him last election; he bought the only piece of ground buyable, run up houses there, built little tenements for the poor, gave away his money, and carried his election. Both parties are now struggling against the next trial. The royalty is Luttrell's, and so tyrannical is this man that he has imprisoned some masters of vessels who were not his friends, for taking the stones on the beach for ballast. Under this despotism Minehead is ruining,

and Watchet, from a different policy in the lord of the soil, rising daily and becoming prosperous by what this place looses.

Thursday, Aug. 8. Cruckshank took me in his chair to Porlock, six miles. Hedges luxuriantly high for the most part impede the view, through their openings the dark hills are seen, and the coombs that intersect them. A Mr. Lee and Wilmot the Quaker, whom Lloyd and I travelled with to Salisbury, and admired so much, accompanied us. The day ended in rain; and my companions who (except W.) had intended to proceed to Lymouth with me returned. I am, therefore, alone; but instead of them I have a fire, and this employment is plea

sure.

Porlock lies in a vale. The hill which runs from Minehead here ends in one of the finest serrated headlands I ever saw. I looked back upon a horse-way which wound down a little cut in its side, and regretted that Cruckshank had deprived me of the walk. This place is called in the neighbourhood the End of the World. All beyond is inaccessible to carriage or even cart. A sort of sledge is used by the country people, resting upon two poles like cartshafts. Mother Shipton prophesied that "Porlock Bay

Should old England betray:" and at every rumour of invasion her rhyme of evil omen is remembered here.

My candlestick is of ancient make and useful; half-way up is a broad circle of brass, like a dumb waiter, which serves to hold the snuffers. The bed room reminded me of Spain, two long, old, dark tables with benches, and an old chest, composed its furniture; but there was an oval looking-glass, a decent pot de chambre, and no fleas !

Friday 9. Two travellers arrived dripping wet the preceding night from Ilfracomb with a guide here, there was a guide for me and a horse. The man was stupid. He conducted me over the hill instead of taking the road nearer the channel, where there are many noble scenes; and what there was remarkable in the barren, objectless |

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track we went he did not point out. I thus lost the Danish encampment where Hubba besieged Oddune. We past the spot where Kenwith Castle stood; but for which fortress and its gallant defender, the efforts of Alfred might perhaps have been vain, and the tide of our history have flowed in a different channel. From this place the descent to Lymouth begins, it runs upon the edge of a tremendous precipice and the sea at the base! a bank of from two to three feet is the only barrier. At the bottom, in a glen, lies Lymouth. We past through and ascended half a mile up the steepest of possible hills to Linton, where the public house is better than in the larger village below.

Two rivers, each coming down a different coombe, and each descending so rapidly among huge stones as to foam like a long waterfall, join at Lymouth, and enter the sea immediately at their junction; and the roar of the sea forms with them but one sound. Of these coombes one is richly wooded, the other runs up between bare and stony hills; a fine eminence, Line Cliff, rises between them. Even without the sea this would be one of the finest scenes I ever beheld; it is one of those delightful and impressive places from which the eye turns to rest upon the minutest home object-a flower, a bank of moss, a stone covered with lichens.

From Linton an easy and little descent led me to the Valley of Stones. The range of hills here next the sea are completely stripped of their soil, the bones only of the earth remain: in the vale, stone upon stone is scattered, and the fern grows among them. Its origin I could not conjecture. Water to have overwhelmed such a height must have inundated all the lower country, a thing evidently impossible: and the hills on the other side the valley, not an arrow's flight distant, are clothed with herbage. A water spout perhaps; but I am, to my shame, no naturalist, and must hypothesize as a poet.

Was it the work of our giants, of the race of Albion? we have historical proof

that they were not large limbed enough, for | Goemagog, one of the hugest of them, was not too big for Corineus to carry. I conceive it, therefore, being unable to trace any other inhabitants of Britain who possessed power enough for the wonder, to be the ruins of some work erected by the devils who concubinated with the fifty daughters of Diocletian; not that Diocletian who chose to lengthen his name of Diocles for the same reason that the inhabitants of Frog Lane in Bristol, in contempt of the original godfathers of the said Frog Lane, have genteelized it into Frogmore Street—but the Thracian king, and this diabolic origin accounts why the process of nature in clothing the rocks does not proceed here beyond a luxuriance of lichens.

On the summit of the highest point of the hill, two large stones inclining against each other form a portal; here I laid myself at length-a level platform of turf spread before me about two yards long, and then the eye fell immediately on the seaa giddy depth. After closing my eyes a minute, it was deeply impressive to open them upon the magnificent dreariness, and the precipice, and the sea. A Mr. Williams led me here in the morning; in the evening I came alone, and resigned myself to the solitude. This Mr. Williams is a natural son of the Duke of Gloucester.

The alehouse at Linton is bad. Mr. Lean was there and claimed acquaintance with me, because his son had met me at Bristol. He is a pleasant, intelligent man, and showed me where to walk. I learnt afterwards that he travels twice or thrice a year with a cartful of goods round Exmoor; and when he arrives at a village, it is proclaimed at the church door that Mr. Lean is come.

Saturday 10. To Ilfracombe five hours and a quarter; the distance variously computed from fifteen to eighteen miles. Two young sailors were my guides; and an acquaintance of theirs went part of the way. He caught a young lark, and it was quite distressing to see the parent bird fluttering

about him. I pleaded for the poor prisoner, and he was released. We passed through Combmartin, an old, and dirty, and poor place; one house, once a good one, bears the date 1584; another is built in a most ridiculous castle style, and called the Pack of Cards. Near is Watermouth, a harbour not used, but strikingly beautiful, the one side formed by a peninsular rock running out parallel with the shore, with herbage on its summit-and a little islanded fragment at the end.

Similarly formed is the harbour at Ilfracombe, and much of the town stands on the peninsula. The shores are broken and fine, the country naked and dreary. To Barnstaple is eleven miles; as you approach the town you have a fine view of the bay, and river, and town, of Biddeford on the right.

Sunday 11. A rainy day, and the devil himself dislikes walking in the wet, for it is written that he wandereth up and down in dry places. I went by stage to Taunton, in the coach were a daughter of Dr. Cullen, a woman unhappily ugly, a Scotchman, myself, and another young man of about my age, and like me in a white hat. I found him universally read, and an oriental scholar; he interested me, and told me if I came to Exmouth he should be glad to show me the place. Breakfast at South Molton, twelve miles; dinner at Tiverton, eighteen; Taunton, twenty-two. The Scotchman and I past the evening together; he chose theology for the subject of conversation, and exprest much surprise that I talked intelligibly and without anger: he gave me his address and a friendly invitation. Samuel Watson, Tanner, Ayr, Scotland.

Monday 12. Bishops Lediard five. Here I astonished my aunt Mary by breakfasting with her. Seven over Quantock to Stowey.

At Wellington I saw a very fine boy, about twelve years old, who lost both his legs by the severe cold last winter. At Linton, in a little shop window, I saw caricatures of the coalition. At Tiverton, the boiled beef

had an herb-stuffing which pleased me much.

TUESDAY, Aug. 27. To Taunton twelve. To Honiton eighteen. At Honiton they put the Coleridges into a chaise with cart-horses. We were told that the towns-people there are remarkably dishonest, and have been so ever since the borough has been venal. On the road is one rich view over the vale of Taunton.

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Wednesday 28. To Seaton twelve. hilly and uninteresting road, for some miles over an open heath so luckily lonely that we found our trunk, which fell off some half mile before it was mist. At Seaton no lodgings were to be had. It is a high, open, naked, Dorsetshire sort of country, with nothing to make me leave it with regret or remember it with pleasure. To St. Mary Ottery, twelve. The church here is very beautiful, the place itself remarkable as the birth-place of Gower, and Browne the Pastoral Poet, and Coleridge.

From Ottery I walked with S. T. Coleridge to Budley Salcombe; on the way we past the mansion of Sir Walter Raleigh. In Lord Rolle's park are the finest beeches I ever saw, one in particular which is quite dead, but in its ramifications even more beautiful than the summer trees; it branched into three great branches, one of which shot immediately into three smaller ones. The Otter enters the sea at Budley Salcombe. I forded it at its mouth. The scenery upon the river is tame and soothing; like all the Devonshire rivers it often overflows.

Also we went to Sidmouth, a nasty watering place, infested by lounging ladies, and full of footmen.

Monday, Sept. 2. To Exeter twelve.

Exeter is ancient and stinks. The cathedral looks well in those points where both towers are seen, and the body of the building only half. The bells rung for the surrender of the Dutch fleet. One church with two bells went ding dong, another had but one, and could only ding. It is a bigotted

place; there are persons here who always call the Americans the rebels. One great street, Fore Street, runs through the city, the rest is dirty lanes; as you cross the bridge you look down upon a town below you intersected by water in a strange way. The river Ex is fine, and the walks on its banks. There is a canal whose shores are completely naturalized, and most beautifully clothed with flowers.

Wednesday, Sept. 11. Coleridge and I set out to Moreton, for about seven miles the way was hilly and heavy. We then crost the Teign by a beautiful old notched bridge, and ascended a woody hill rich in magnificent views of woods and the river below. It rained incessantly the last half of the way, and we rejoiced in expectation of the waterfall to-morrow. To Moreton twelve.

Thursday. Through Bovey and Manniton, two beautiful villages, to Becky Fall. The stream falls among huge round stones, -a striking scene. But we were some hours too late for the rush after the rains; and waterfalls, unless they are Niagaras, usually disappoint. Mediocrity in a cataract is as bad as in poetry. Near this is Lustleigh Cleeve, a similar scene. Indeed the whole county repays a pilgrimage. We touched upon Dart Moor, and passed very near Heiter Cliff, the highest point in the county,-a rocky summit, visible almost everywhere, and sometimes looking like a ruin. This we left on our right, descending into the vale. The road is intricate, and the directing posts of no use to a stranger, or little, for they are only marked with the initial letter of the town to which they point. One spot I remember with pleasure, and saw with delight, a little vale watered with a mill-stream, the circling hills high, and on one part deeply wooded, the vale sprinkled with fine old ashes, that seemed to have been spared by a man of taste when he rooted up a grove. The mill stood under the hill, a neat, comfortable habitation. A saw-pit was before it. There was just enough of man, and what there was, was in keeping. Ashburton twelve, a good town.

Friday. Totness eight. The road affording prospects worth looking at, and fine where it crosses the Dart. Totness is a neat town, which spread very finely as we looked back upon it. The right way to see the country is to go by water to Dartmouth; but we were too late for the boat, and were therefore compelled to walk ten miles along a road heavy, uninteresting, and objectless, but not flat, for the calves of my legs suffered most Procrustian extension up the hills.

Dartmouth is a strange and beautiful place. The river is broad, some half or three quarters of a mile to the opposite town, Kingswear. The hills not high enough, but yet beautiful. The walk to the Fort leads along the waterside by a terrace, for the town is built high. By moonlight we saw it.

Saturday. Crossed the Dart to Brixham, five. Torbay is shored with red sandbanks. We were wearied with its insipidity, and struck for Newton Bushell sixteen.

Sunday. Exeter fourteen. The walk afforded some Devonshire views, that is, extensive scenes in which the eye found no one object to rest upon.

By Newton Bushel we saw a board, “Man Traps and Spring Guns are tilled' in this Garden." Tilled, therefore, is prepared, made ready.

Devonshire has been overpraised. The hills are high, angled over with hedges, but no wood. A new country that had no forests would look like it. They are high enough to fatigue, and yet not enough to excite admiration. The rivers make the beauty of this county,-clear, melodious, down-hill streams. Its great merit is Clouted Cream, of which I make honourable mention!

EXETER. Mr. Grainger's garden is singular in its kind. It is in the Castle ditch,2 and this accident has been made the most of. It is well planted with many and noble trees. There is the finest poplar that I remember. I have also seen the pictures of Mr. Abbot, an apothecary here. I never saw better landscapes; finished even with Dutch niceness, yet good in effect; interesting in every part, yet fine wholes. He seems to have studied nature with uncommon care and success. His shadows are particularly fine,—not the vulgar black of painters, but ever partaking of the colour of the object.

The corporation used to compel people to keep their doors clean. Twelvemonths since it was discovered that they had no authority to do this, and now the people will not clean away the dirt, because "they can't force us to."

At Exeter is a choice collection of watercolour drawings, in the possession of Mr. Patch. The two masterpieces of Paine are there, and some incomparable pieces by Smith, Turner, and Pococke.

HONITON Sixteen. The vale rich and beautiful. Axminster nine. Bridport twelve. Dorchester sixteen. A hideous country, cultivated without enclosures, the hills scored with furrows like roast pork. Wareham ten, dreary and desolate. Poole ten. Christ

Church fourteen.

TUESDAY, October 29. Ringwood eight. Rumsey seventeen. On the way is the Picked Post, an extra-parochial alehouse, where unmarried women go to lie in, out of the reach of the constables. There is also on this road an oak, once venerated, and still visited, because it buds on Christmas day. An open country, some of the forest scenery fine. Winchester eleven, in part through the forest. The cathedral has more to admire than

2 The garden at Eccleshall Castle, the Palace of the Bishop of Lichfield, is also in the ditch. It was the admiration of poor Bishop Butler, and I am not likely to for geta bed of Gladioli he pointed out to me there.-J. W. W.