and with their velvet jackets, yellow corduroy breeches, huge brogans, miniature felt hats stuck on one side of the head, and flowers pinned into their coat-collars, they are indeed quite presentable giants. CHAPTER XXI. CORNWALL AND PENZANCE. STRIKING again upon the South Devon road, I went on to Totness. At Totness we crossed the beautiful river Dart, navigable ten miles from Dartmouth. One sees here in England the meaning of the names Dartmouth, Exmouth, Plymouth, &c., which transferred to our American inland, or simply shore towns, have lost all their original significance. From Totness to Plymouth the distance is twenty-four and a half miles, and the road passes through much interesting Devonshire scenery, especially about Ivy Bridge, a favorite neighborhood for artists. The Dartmoor highlands lie somewhat to the north, which though not of great elevation are exceedingly romantic, forming a wild, solitary, and tempestuous region. Plymouth, a name dear to the American, has great beauties and charms of its own. I can never forget the surprise I experienced at the first sight of the harbor of Plymouth from the Hoe promenade; to say that it is an English Bay of Naples, would have little meaning, for there is no resemblance between the two; but Plymouth Bay is certainly the most noble, varied, and beautiful, of all the English harbors, and there are few in the world to compare with it. And out of it about this time of the year, perhaps upon such a clear, fresh, and golden autumn morning, with the trees of Edgcumbe Park just turning crimson, and the waves in the bay curling merrily to the breeze, the little Mayflower put out to sea, bearing another England within her! New Plymouth, so the tradition is, was named from a fancied resemblance to the old Plymouth. The resemblance must be very slight. A Pilgrim College is now established at or near the traditional spot where the embarkation of the Pilgrims for America took place. This event is thus related in the "Journal of the Pilgrims:" "Wednesday, the sixt of September, the Wind comming East North East a fine small gale, we loosed from Plimoth, hauing beene kindly intertained and curteously vsed by diuers friends there dweling, and after many difficulties in boysterous stormes, at length by God's prouidence vpon the ninth of Nouember following, by breake of the day we espied land." And it seems to be England's destiny still to have her population flow away ever from her shores toward America. With all the increasing wealth of England, her system of taxation falling so unequally on the lower classes, and the tendency of her legislation to concentrate the landed interests in the hands of a few, so that the small landholders are every year diminishing in number and in ability to * * Walker's Science of Wealth, p. 370. support themselves, and with her untold millions of hopeless paupers, great numbers must emigrate or starve; so that willingly or unwillingly England still continues to nourish America, and America is twice-born of the mother-country. The Tamar River widens at its mouth and forms Plymouth Sound, and the splendid inner basin of the Hamoaze, some four miles long, and capable of mooring a hundred sail of the line. The estuary of the Plym, called the Cat-water, is a still larger anchorage for merchant vessels to the east of the city. These are both crowded with vast frigates, and with smaller shipping, the view up the Hamoaze ending with the long and lofty lines of Albert Bridge at Saltash. The massive citadel of Plymouth, and the pyramidal rock of Drake's Island, strongly fortified, give a grave and solid aspect to the scene; while the lovely banks of the Tamar, and the thickly wooded promontory of Mount Edgcumbe, take it out of the commonplace of harbor views, and lend it a strange picturesqueness. Mount Edgcumbe, with its feathery slopes and bold banks girdled by the deep blue sea, peculiarly attracted-so says his biographer-the painter Turner; as did also this whole region about Plymouth Bay, and the sweet scenery of the Tamar River. And indeed there is no one who has so photographed by the sun-flash of genius the varied scenery of all England, as this eccentric but enthusiastic lover of his native land has done. Born in one of the most obscure of the dingy courts of London, the son of a barber, and with the prospect of frizzling hair himself all his life, his genius was first fairly awaked by the daily sight of the river Thames, and by the trees and meadows of Twickenham and Bushy Park, in the neighborhood of which he was sent to school. He afterward saw the ocean at Margate in Kent, where he also went to school; and there he fell in love with the sister of a school-mate, which led to the great sorrow of his life, but which, perhaps, wedded him the more closely to Art. His blue eyes, red face, and stout, short, shabbily dressed form, might have been seen a quarter of a century ago or more in every part of Devonshire, on its southern and northern coasts he used to say he was a Devonshire man also in Cornwall where he sketched St. Michael's Mount, in Wiltshire with Beckford, in Kent, in Derbyshire, and above all in Yorkshire, his favorite county. He was preëminently an English painter, as Milton was an English poet. Ruskin says that he so caught the trick of the Yorkshire hills, rounding as they do at the summit with a break or precipice at the foot instead of one sheer to the top, that he really made the Alps themselves bend in the same way to do homage to his unconquerable English genius.* Turner, as far as I have gained any conception of his character, seems to me to be a type of the best and worst, the greatest and meanest traits of the English mind, original, incomprehensible, positive, reticent, acqui* Thornbury's Life of Turner, Vol. I., p. 151. |