to do with the matter, it is certain that the list is one that can be rivalled by few other counties, probably by none : 6 'I should not,' he concludes, alluding perhaps to the glorification of nous autres Français,' implied in the bold conjecture of Mr. Bodin,' have spun out this theme so long, but to stop their mouthes, who, being sooner taught to speak than understand, take advantage of the rude language and plaine attire of our countrymen, admiring nothing more than themselves, or the magnificent splendours of their own habitation. As though all the witt in the world were annexed to their own schooles, and no flowres of science could grow in another garden. But a rude dialect being more indebted to custom than nature, is a small argument of a blockishe disposition; and a homelie outside may shroude more witt than the silkworme's industry. I have sometimes heard a rude speech in a frize habit expresse better sense than at other times a scarlett robe; and a plaine yeoman with a mattocke in his hand, speake more to the purpose than some counsellours at the barre.” Mr. Bodin's acquaintance with the sweet receptacle of western wits was in all probability very limited; and, if he ever lighted on it, he must have been considerably edified by this elaborate attack on his general proposition. As a Devonshire man, however, Carpenter may have thought that some defence of his native county was not uncalled for on other grounds. Notwithstanding Queen Elizabeth's often quoted saying, that 'The Devonshire gentry were all born courtiers, with a becoming confidence,' it is certain that, as well at that time as long afterwards, the remote land of Western Barbary enjoyed, on certain points of civilization and manners, a very questionable preeminence. A sweet county?' said Quin the epicure, on his return from eating John Dories at Plymouth'no, sir; I found nothing sweet in Devonshire-except the vinegar.' Fifty years since the nicer delicacies of the table were evidently quite unknown to the savage natives. Some ignorance of so refined a science may reasonably be expected from a people whose manners, when Herrick wrote, were rockie as their ways,' and whose gentry, according to Lady Fanshaw, however loyal and hospitable, were 'of a crafty and censorious nature, as most used to be so far from London.' After this, we are not surprised to find Clarendon accounting for Monk's 'rough and doubtful' answer to the Duke of Ormond about the regiment to be sent from Ireland for the King, by the fact that he had no other education but Dutch and Devonshire.' The roughness and independence which are perhaps to some extent still characteristic of the men of Devonshire, were no doubt greatly fostered by two geographical features of their county, which have influenced its history from the earliest times —its isolation and the position of its harbours. Shut in by the Cornish peninsula on one side, with which the Saxon Defnsætas' felt little sympathy, and by the sea on the north and south, the only land communication of Devonshire with the rest of England lies eastward through Somerset and Dorset. Great woods and deep marshes, however, formed for many centuries a kind of natural barrier, and would have prevented much intercourse with the neighbouring counties had their original settlers been more nearly of kindred race than in fact they were. The men of Devonshire were thus early compelled to depend upon their own resources- -a task in the prosecution of which no small difficulties were to be successfully encountered. The earliest notices of 'our Dævon' suggest very different images from those with which its name is now associated-the soft sea breezes, the rose and myrtle covered cottages, and the broad green meadows dotted with lazy cows. The country was wild and desolate, and so thickly covered with forest that 'the woodlands of Dyvnaint' is the expression by which it is generally referred to in the earliest Welch poems. Aldhelm's Dira Domnonia'* alludes perhaps as much to the moral condition of the district, where the heretical Britons refused to keep their Easter in due season, as to its physical character; but the Domesday Survey, with its miles of wood and coppice, and its thinly-scattered population, supplies material for a sufficiently rugged picture, the accuracy of which is confirmed by subsequent chroniclers. Poor and hungry (jejunum et squalidum), according to William of Malmesbury, was the land about Exeter, now among the most productive in the county. Its scanty crop of oats, says the Monk of Devizes, somewhat varying Johnson's famous definition, supplied one and the same nutriment to man and beast. There were indeed certain districts, in the South Hams and elsewhere, which seem always to have been noted for their fruitfulness; but the mass of the county had to be reclaimed by patient industry. In Fuller's time the work had been tolerably accomplished, and Devonshire stood high among the agricultural counties. No shire,' he says, 'shows more industrious, or so many husbandmen, who make the ground both to take and keep a moderate fruitfulnesse; so that Virgil, if now alive, might make additions to his Georgicks from the plough-practice in this county.' *The expression occurs in one of his poems "Quando profectus fueram If, however, the situation of Devonshire with respect to other English counties was remote and isolated, some compensation was afforded by the many and excellent harbours on its southern coast, supplying not less ample opportunity for the development of its energies by sea, than the reclamation of its heaths and coppices did by land. At a very early period, the position of these harbours immediately opposite Brittany and the west coast of France, and later, their convenience as points of departure for the new-found world of America, gave them an importance of no ordinary character, and produced a race of hardy and daring seamen, of whom Westcote, writing in the reign of James I., asserts that the whole world brings forth no better.' The difficulties to be encountered both by sea and land went to form the character of the men of Devonshire; in whose history may be traced, we think, a certain independence resulting from the isolation of their county-a carelessness and indifference about the great events which were stirring other parts of England—a dislike of all change, as in the matter of the reformation of religion and at the same time a resolute defence of what appeared to them their own interests, as instances of which we may refer to the rising at the time of the Reformation, and to the conduct of the clubmen during the civil war. Perhaps the buccaneering spirit which prevailed so extensively among the Devonshire adventurers of the sixteenth century, and the fact that many of the pirates who haunted the narrow seas during the reigns of James and Charles I. were natives of Plymouth, Dartmouth, and Barnstaple, may be regarded as illustrations of the same independent and unclubbable' temper. No satisfactory or accurate history of Devonshire exists. The nearest approach to one is the volume which forms part of Lysons's Magna Britannia,' published in 1822. The earliest collections for the county were made in the first half of the seventeenth century, by Sir William Pole of Shute, Tristram Risdon of Winscot, and Westcote of Shobrook, near Crediton. Westcote's book, printed for the first time in 1845, is curious, and may be accepted as a very complete View of Devonshire about the year 1630, in spite of certain omissions of which, as he tells us himself, he had been accused, such as his having made no mention of the great bear which fought nine dogs when the Duke of Anjou, the French King's brother, was in Devonshire. Polwhele's History of Devonshire, 1793-98,' was never completed, and abounds in every kind of inaccuracy, although gossiping stories occur in it here and there which deserve sifting. A far more important book is the Damnonii Orientales Illustres, or Worthies of Devon,' of the Rev. John Prince, vicar of Berry Pomeroy, Pomeroy, published in folio in 1701, and reprinted, with additional notes, in 1810. Both editions have now become rare. Prince's book was welcomed with a chorus of applause from all his brother clergy, many of whom came forward with laudatory verses, as, for instance, Mr. William Pearse of Dean Prior :'You've done the work, Sir; but you can't be pay'd Until among those Worthies you are laid : Then future ages will unjustly do To write of Worthies, and to leave out you.' The Devonshire 'Orientales Illustres' are for the most part something more than grands hommes de province;' and we can scarcely imagine a more delightful volume than might be made of Prince's Worthies, with the additions to be derived by modern research, and with illustrations from good portraits, personal relics, ancient manor-houses, and sepulchral monuments. That Devonshire has been far from idle of late years in collecting material for her future historian is sufficiently proved by the list of works we have placed at the head of this article. The handsome volumes of the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society' contain many valuable and well-illustrated papers relating to the Ecclesiology of the county; and the same Society has issued a series of so-called 'Rough Notes,' in which the principal features and present condition of every church in Devonshire are duly recorded. The printed resources relating to Devonshire are catalogued in Mr. Davidson's excellent Bibliotheca,' a volume of more than 200 pages. Dr. Oliver, in such a wellprinted folio as Mabillon would have turned over with pleasure, has supplied us with a Monasticon' far more complete than that contained in the latest edition of Dugdale; and Mr. Rowe has lovingly and laboriously 'perambulated' the wild country of Dartmoor, in many respects the most attractive, and, if its borders are included, the most picturesque portion of the county. But there is something in every nook to reward investigation. 'I only know,' says the author of "Tom Browne,' 'two English neighbourhoods thoroughly; and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country.' We doubt if there be a single Devonshire parish of which the same thing might not be said. The first indistinct appearance of Devonshire through the mists of dawning history connects it with the mysterious Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, which for so many ages were 'hid from those who sailed the main.' There can be no doubt that the tin of Dartmoor was worked at a very early period, nor that the harbours of Devonshire were the chief emporia from which it was conveyed across to the neighbouring continent, or on board the ships of Phoenician traders. Exeter, the Caer Isc' of the Britons, situated, like most Celtic towns, just at the point where the river ceases to be navigable, and Seaton, at the mouth of the Axe, on the eastern border of the county, seem to have been the principal centres of this ancient traffic. From the latter a road has been traced extending quite across the island to Yarmouth, and resembling, in its general character, the betterknown Pilgrim's Way' which ran from Southampton or its neighbourhood to the eastern coast of Kent. These roads are certainly not of Roman origin, and they apparently indicate a very ancient commercial intercourse with Armorica (the Veneti?) on the one hand, and the Teutonic tribes in the neighbourhood of the Rhine on the other. Much tin may have been exported from Seaton, the ancient Moridunum, which was connected by a line of British road with Exeter; but the relics which have been discovered in so great numbers at this latter place--including numerous coins of the Greek dynasties of Syria and Egypt *— afford a more certain proof of its great importance as the centre of the Mediterranean tin trade, long before the appearance in the West of the legions of Vespasian. In order to find the yet lingering traces of the tribes who laboured in the mines and streamworks, and who peopled the deep coombes of Devonshire at that distant day, we must climb the heights of Dartmoor and wander over the dusky moorland, amidst whose solitudes they have been preserved. Here, remains of the so-called 'primæval' periodcairns, kistvaens, stone circles, and avenues of upright stones or parallelitha-abound, and, although of comparatively small size, derive a peculiar impressiveness from the wild character of the landscape in which they are set. Among them the 'parallelitha -as archæologists have agreed to call the long rows of upright stones, placed at regular distances from each other, opening here and there into circles, and winding in a serpentine form along the hillside are almost peculiar to Dartmoor, and deserve perhaps more attention than they have hitherto received from Celtic antiquaries. On a small scale they resemble the famous avenues at Carnac, in Brittany. The most important have been described by Mr. Rowe; but there is scarcely a heather-clad tor which does not possess at least one of these avenues, more or less perfect, half hidden among the fern and heath, and generally terminating close * Numerous coins of Antioch, Chalcis, Zeugma on the Euphrates, and Alexandria, have been discovered at Exeter-always at great depths. In 1810 a large quantity were found about 20 feet below the surface of the present Fore-street, which is in fact the Ikenild Way. Figures of some of these coins may be seen in Mr. Shortt's 'Sylva Antiqua Iscana.' to |