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The rowan tree or mountain ash.

The violets of this district are proverbial for their abundance and beauty.

Dio Cassius, lxvi., relates, that previously to the destruction of the city, figures of gigantic size were seen hovering in the air, and that a voice like the sound of a trumpet was often heard. Probably the imagination of the inhabitants invested with human figure the vapours that preceded the eruption.

Virg. Georg. i. 476.

Pompeii was destroyed on the 23rd of August, A.D. 79. See Plinii Epist. I, vi. 16, 20; Dio Cassius, lxvi. It remained undiscovered during fifteen centuries.

Eustace and other modern writers have thought it improbable that the inhabitants of Pompeii could have assembled to enjoy the amusement of the theatre after the shocks of the earthquake and other symptoms of danger which preceded the eruption; but as their theatrical representations partook of the nature of religious solemnities, there does not seem sufficient reason to disregard the positive assertion of Dio Cassius to the contrary.

Ivory tickets of admission were found in the vicinity of one of the theatres, inscribed on one side with the name of a play of Æschylus, and on the other with a representation of the theatre itself. One or two of these are preserved in the studio at Naples.

Virg. Georg. ii. 146.

On many of the walls the word, Salve, is carved over the door.

“The amphoræ which contained wine still remain, and the marble slabs are marked with cups and glasses.”—Eustace.

At the door of the court of one of the houses skeletons were found, one with a key, another with a purse.”—Eustace.

Gilbert Mawgan, a noted wrecker, lived in a hut that stood by the sea shore at Mellhuach, or The Vale of the Lark. Among other crimes it is said that he once buried the captain of a vessel, whom he found exhausted on the strand, alive! At the death of the old man, they told me that a vessel came up the Channel, made for Mellhuach bay and lay-to amid a tremendous surf. When Mawgan ceased to breathe she stood-out to sea and disappeared.

The Blackrock is a bold, dark, pillared mass of schist, which rises midway on the shore of Widemouth Bay, near Bude, and is held to be the lair of the troubled spirit of Featherstone the wrecker, imprisoned therein until he shall have accomplished his doom.

The rugged heights that line the seashore in the neighbourhood of Tintadgel Castle and Church are crested with towers. Among these, that of Bottreaux, or, as it is now written, Boscastle, is without bells. The silence of this wild and lonely churchyard on festive or solemn occasions is not a little striking. On inquiry I was told that the bells were once shipped for this church, but that when the vessel was within sight of the tower the blasphemy of her captain was punished in the manner related in the Poem. The bells, they told me, still lie in the bay, and announce by strange sounds the approach of a storm.

This wild bird chiefly haunts the coasts of Devon and Cornwall. The common people believe that the soul of King Arthur inhabits one of these birds, and no entreaty or bribe would induce an old Tintadgel quarry-man to kill me one.

The castle mound of the former residence of the Barons of Bottreaux is the sole relic of their race.

Cuthbert is pronounced, and sometimes written, Cubert.

The Collegiate Church of Saint Crantock, or Carantock, consisted of a Dean and nine Prebendaries. It was conveyed to the Church of Exeter in the year 1236. The college was dissolved in 1534.

Cornwall.

A band of monks, from a place of the same name on the Loire, founded a Priory on this rock before the time of Edward the Confessor.

“She loved Warbeck,” says Bacon, “utterly in all his fortunes, and the name of The White Rose, which he gave her in his pride, men continued unto her, because of her beauty.” He left her at St. Michael's Mount on his march to London. Of her fate after his capture and death, there are conflicting legends. Our Cornish dames assert that she died— their husbands, that she married again. I have adopted the more poetical catastrophe.

This poem was suggested by the following romantic story, told by the author of the Waltham MS. in the Cottonian Library. . .

“If we may believe him, two of the Canons, Osgod Choppe and Ailric, the childe-maister, were sent to be spectators of the battle. They obtained from William, to whom they presented ten marks of gold, permission to search for the body of their benefactor. Unable to distinguish it among the heaps of the slain, they sent for Harold's mistress, Editha, surnamed The Fair and The Swan's Neck. By her his features were recognised. The corpse was interred at Waltham with regal honours in the presence of several Norman earls and gentlemen.”—Lingard's History of England.

In a rocky gorge, midway between the castles of Bottreaux and Dundagel, there is a fall of waters into a hollow cauldron of native stone, which has borne for ten centuries the name of St. Nectan's Kieve. He was the brother of St. Morwenna, and like her is one of the storied names along this northern shore. He founded the Stations, now the Churches, of Hartland and Wellcombe; and bequeathed his name to other sacred places by the “Severn Sea,” in the former ages of Cornish faith.

When I first visited his Kieve, in 1830, the outline of an oratory, or the reliques of a cell, stood by the brook, on a knoll, just where the waters took their leap. There is a local legend linked with this ruined abode, which was told me on the spot; and which I expanded at the time into the above ballad. I have recognized the coinage of my brain in the prosaic paraphrases of Wilkie Collins, Walter White, and other subsequent writers; but with regard to any claimant for the original imagination, I must reply, in the language of Jack Cade, “No, no; I invented it myself.”

Vide also “Arscott of Tetcott,” p. 147.

For an account of Black John, vide “Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall,” p. 67.

The facts on which the above Ballad is founded are well known in Cornwall. I have only altered the name and place.

Dupath Spring gushes at the foot of Hingston Tor. Its waters flow through the arched door of a granite cell; and, like most of the guarded wells of our country, “it hath a meaning,” which I have endeavoured to record. Goetz of the Iron Hand and other warriors imitated in after times the death of Siward.

Two strangers, with their followers-at-arms, arrived on a certain night at a village near Trebarra strand. A corpse, carried on a bier and covered with a pall, seemed the chief object of their care. One of these strangers remained by the body while the other watched the sea. At dawn, a ship appeared in sight, neared the shore, and sent off a boat. The strangers hastened to the beach, placed the corpse in the boat, embarked with it and were never heard of more. This legend, a distorted account of an actual occurtence in the twelfth century, is still current in the neighbourhood of Trebarra, and was related to me there.

There are remains of many small buildings on this coast which the people call “Watch and Ward Towers,” as they no doubt were when piracy was common on the coast, in the old times.

“So when even was come, the Lord of the Vineyard saith unto his steward, call the labourers, and give them their hire.”—Saint Matthew xx. 8.

Among the rural inhabitants of Cornwall the burial of the dead usually takes place in the evening, because the bearers have then “left work.”

There is a wide extent of hilly moorland stretching from Rough Tor to Carradon and heaped with rude structures of various kinds, that would reward the researches of an Antiquary. The cromlech, piled rocks, and unhewn pillar, are commonly referred to the times of Druidical worship. To me, they seem to claim a more ancient origin. A simple structure of stone was the usual altar and monument of the Patriarchal Religion. The same feelings would actuate the heirs of that creed in Cornwall as in Palestine; and the same motives would induce them to rear a pillar there, and to pour oil thereon, and to call it the Place of God.

The word tre signifies in the ancient Cornish tongue “the place of abode,” and barrow means “a burial mound.” The word “Trebarrow” implies, therefore, “a dwelling among the graves;” and my house at North Tamerton was so named by me because it was surrounded by these green heaps of the dead. Some of these I opened, and in the centre of one of them I found an urn of baked clay filled with human ashes, and a patera, which I still possess, of the same material. It denotes in all likelihood the entombment of a Keltic priest, and that of pre-Christian times.

An alien priory to the abbey of St. Sergius, at Angiers, once occupied this glen. When it was dissolved the chapel was suffered to remain. It still preserves a record of the monasteries in its name—“the minster church.”

On an artificial mound in the gorge of a valley, near this church, stood the castle of the Barons of Bottreaux; the name of their place of abode accrued to the surrounding village, which is now abbreviated into Boscastle [Bottreaux' Castle.]

The doom of the immured is fearfully described in the second canto of “Marmion.”

A confirmation was held in this church by the Lord Bishop of the diocese [Bishop Phillpotts.—Ed.], on Wednesday, the 17th day of August, 1836—a day which will long be an era to be remembered by the inhabitants of a secluded district, never before honoured by an episcopal visit.

1 The rose and the fleur-de-lys, adopted from Song of Solomon ii. I, were used as ecclesiastical emblems some centuries before they were assumed into the shields of Normandy and England.

My glebe occupies a position of wild and singular beauty: its western boundary is the sea, skirted by tall and tremendous cliffs, and near their brink, with the exquisite taste of Ecclesiastical antiquity, is placed the church. The original and proper designation of the parish is Morwenstow—that is, Morwenna's Stow or Station—but it has been corrupted by recent usage, like many other local names. Halfway down a precipitous cliff near the church there still survives, with its perpetual water but ruined walls, the Well of Morwenna, an old baptismal fount; and another, the vicarage Well of St. John, is used in the church in regeneration to this day.

1 Who can read without emotion the last words of Ridley, written in his prison-house in Oxford, in memory of the “scenes that he had loved the best” during the life that he was about to forego for Jesus Christ his sake? Who that loves old Oxford can fail to be touched by the passage to which these lines refer:—“Farewell sweet Magdalen-walks in Oxford, where I did learn Saint Paul's Epistles by heart.”

“I have sought in these verses, to suggest a shadow of that beautiful instruction to Christian men, the actual and spiritual presence of our Lord in the second Sacrament of his Church; a primal and perpetual doctrine in the faith once delivered to the Saints. How sadly the simplicity of this hath and has been distorted and disturbed by the gross and sensuous notion of a carnal presence introduced by the Romish innovation of the eleventh century!”—Note in Ecclesia. 1841.

“I have sought in these verses, to suggest the manner of that miraculous event, the actual and etherial Presence of Our Lord in the Second Sacrament of His Church.”—Note in Echoes from Old Cornwall, 1846.

The Herods were of Idumean race.

The name for Husband in this country.

This was written on the supposition that the Prince would be named in the liturgy.

The name Jordan signifies the river of Dan.

Joshua iii. 13.

“Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him.”—St. Matt. iii. 13.

“The earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.”—Romans viii. 19.

The ancient name (cf. Judges i. 31) of St. Jean d'Acre.

The Syriac name of Jesus, Son of Mary.