chapter 54 which shows that it was written after 329 B.C., but had

overlooked a passage in chapter 46 which shows that it was written before 325 B.C.; and I cited this passage, and thereby limited the date. Amongst other things I proposed to read _architheô_ ... for _archiereô_ ... in chapter 56, as I happened to remember that _architheôrois_ came in the same context in an inscription of that period. I think my reading was right--all subsequent editions have adopted it--but I should very much like to know if the word went wrong in copying or dictation, or was a slip of Aristotle’s own pen.

I fancy that the Greek and Latin authors wrote the wrong word now and then, and never noticed it. That is not the view of textual critics and editors: they ascribe all errors to the men who copied out the manuscripts. But this limits them to errors that might arise in copying, and thus restricts the choice of emendations far too much. Take such an emendation as _Isara_ for _Arar_ in Livy, xxi. 31. This makes Livy say that the river was the Isère, not the Saône; but the context requires him to say it was the Durance, otherwise he would be saying ‘right’ instead of ‘left’ a few lines further on. A copyist might easily write _arar_ for _isara_, so this emendation is accepted, although it does not suit.

Such emendations are deceitful things. In this case they make Livy say the Isère, and make Polybios say it also, iii. 49, though he says something else; and then Members of the Alpine Club go saying that the river must have been the Isère, since Livy and Polybios agree in saying that it was. Other folk may say it does not matter what the river was; but that is a reason for leaving the whole thing alone, not for getting it wrong. If you take it up at all, you should not risk the sort of snubbing that Westbury gave the herald after cross-examination--“Go away, you silly man: you don’t even understand your own silly science.”

My father used to tell me of Westbury’s methods at the Bar. A judge would put a question that seemed to be a poser. Westbury would pause, and then he would not only answer it convincingly, but would put the point with such lucidity that you could not understand how anyone had failed to see it. And the judge would turn quite red, feeling that he had asked a foolish question, and people in court would titter and guffaw, though half of them could never have answered it at all.

But gifts that help an advocate, may be a hindrance to an author. It does sometimes happen that a reviewer knows no more about a subject than he could gather from the book he is reviewing. An author collects materials till he is bewildered--“cannot see the wood for the trees”--and he makes a bulky book, putting all this material in, but doing nothing to clear the subject up. And the reviewer will praise him for his wealth of learning, and will say he has done all that is humanly possible towards the solution of a problem that really is insoluble. Another author sifts the materials and solves the problem. He makes a much smaller book, putting in nothing that is not essential, and stating his conclusions so effectively that they command assent. And the reviewer will dismiss it as a book of platitudes, which tells you nothing that is not obvious to the meanest comprehension.--These, of course, are extreme cases; but the reviewer often fails to see that mere pomposity is not a guarantee of solid learning, and that frivolity need not mean shallowness. There was an essay, _The critic as artist_, written by Wilde in 1891, and full of epigram and paradox; and the reviewers were so dazzled by his flippancy that hardly any of them saw how much sound sense there was beneath it all. A good judge told me that he considered it the best thing of its kind since Plato.

A friend of mine in the same house at Harrow went up to Oxford at the same time that I went up to Cambridge, October 1876. He came over to see me at Trinity, and I went over to see him at Magdalen. (It made me wish that I had gone there too.) On the Sunday evening the Lessons were read by one of the Demies. His reading was dramatically good, but his appearance was astonishing, with his long hair hanging down upon his surplice. I asked who on earth he was, and was told he was a man named Wilde, who could be awfully amusing, but dressed just like a guy. I never made his acquaintance; but, having once seen him, I knew him by sight for evermore. The last time I saw him was in September 1897. I was at Naples, and he was staying in the same hotel--under an assumed name.

My father was never a collector, but would sometimes buy a thing he liked. My grandfather did not approve, and used to write him letters about it, thus, 27 May 1855, “I should say your money might be more advantageously employed than with coins and pictures.” When my grandfather was eighty and my father fifty, this lecturing still went on: 27 July 1869, “You may say No business of mine. I am your father.” It was my turn next. I had a little money when I came of age, and I had a wish to buy a picture by Burne Jones, _Laus Veneris_. My elders looked askance, and talked about Consols; but I should have made a very much better investment than Consols, had I bought that picture then and sold it some years afterwards.

Amongst other presents when I came of age, I got a pair of old bronze busts of Roman emperors. They have been a source of pleasure to me now for forty years; but a dear old lady asked me on that festal day what comfort I should find in them upon my death-bed. There is a precept in the Talmud, _Bâbâ Bathrâ_, vol. VIII, page 60 _b_--“If they are merry at a wedding-feast, cast ashes on the bridegroom’s head.” Happily, she did not know of that. She would have done it, if she had.

I began collecting Greek vases soon after I had come of age, and I found many pitfalls in the way. Thus, I bought three vases somewhere in Etruria in 1883, and the owner undertook to smuggle them out of Italy; but one of the three he sent me, was not one of the three I chose; and I had no redress. There was never much risk of buying a vase that was a downright sham. Plenty of ancient vases come to light in a dilapidated state, and the forgers fake these up in preference to making new ones. I got to know their tricks, but have not kept pace with them since I gave up collecting. In looking at a vase not long ago, I said I could not see the slightest difference between the new glaze and the old. A wiser man said, “Lick it,” and then I found the new glaze had a different taste.

I was at a sale of antiquities at Sotheby’s in 1890, and one of the lots consisted of two Greek vases which were so much alike in style and shape and size that they would make a pair. But one of them was obviously a modern copy of the Amymone vase in the Jatta collection at Ruvo; and people in the auction room resented this, and called out to the auctioneer to go on to the next lot. He said, “But really, gentlemen, are there no bids at all for this?” and I said, “Oh, ten shillings,” and he knocked it down to me. And thus I not only got the copy but got the other vase as well; and this is genuine enough and very interesting too, as it depicts the race in which a lighted torch was carried by runners in relays.

All these Greek vases here were made between 600 and 400 B.C. or thereabouts. In the early style the figures are painted in black and purple on the pale yellow of the clay: in the next style the clay is orange and the painting is technically better, and large portions of the vases are painted black: in the next stage the process is reversed--instead of black figures on an orange or yellow background, there is now a black background with red figures, red being now the colour of the clay. These red-figured vases show Greek art at its very best, and the others mark the stages that led up to it. Personally, I do not care much for vases earlier than these. Very nice vases were found at Ialysos in the island of Rhodes, and Ruskin bought them for the British Museum; but they have none of those great qualities that make Greek art worth studying, nor even a foretaste of such qualities. In its maturity Greek art was far the greatest that the world has ever seen, but it was not so in its infancy or its senile decay.

Apart from any merit they may have as works of art, Greek vases often have a human interest, especially if they are inscribed. One vase here tells you as an interesting fact, “Tleson, the son of Nearchos, made me.” Another says, “Zephyria is a beauty”; and there is the lady herself, attired in a very big helmet and a little pair of drawers, wielding a shield and spear as she performs a Pyrrhic dance. (There is a picture of this vase in the _Revue Archéologique_ for 1895, vol. XXVI, page 221.) Another depicts a man conversing with a youth, and the man has the features of Socrates and satyr’s ears as well. This vase came out of a tomb at Siana in the island of Rhodes, and is as fresh as when it left the potter’s hands at Athens: its only blemish is the imprint of his thumb, made by touching it before the clay was dry. Others are interesting for their former owners’ sake. One belonged to Fergusson, the historian of architecture, and another to Samuel Rogers, the poet, and others to great collectors of the Vulci period, such as Beugnot and Durand.

Being at Burgos, 3 September 1877, I went out to the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, the burial-place of the Cid. The monastery had been uninhabited for forty years: the keys were kept at a village some way off, and the man who kept them had gone out shooting. (Whilst waiting for his return, I saw a little of Spanish agriculture: the oxen treading out the corn, and the peasants winnowing it by throwing it up into the air and trusting to the wind to blow the chaff away.) When he returned, we went down to the monastery; and in the library he suggested that I might like to take away a book or two in remembrance of the place. I had scruples, but he really was considering the best interests of the books themselves. If I had taken them, they might be here in safety; and they have rotted away.

The museums at Athens were a sore temptation to collectors, when I first went there more than forty years ago. There were a dozen of these museums scattered about the town: some of them mere sheds, and hardly any with glass cases for the smaller things, but only wire netting. And there were such beautiful little things that would so easily come through the mesh and go into a collector’s pocket; and they could not possibly be reclaimed, as they were not marked or numbered, and the inventories were vague. In my innocence I bought a vase from a distinguished man (a Greek) and paid him rather a high price for it, forgetting that he probably had stolen it, and I might just as well have stolen it myself.

A very curious vase was discovered in Ægina and placed in one of these museums, a shed on the Acropolis. The vase had a globular body and a griffin’s neck and head above, with the griffin’s beak as spout. A long time afterwards the British Museum bought a vase exactly like it, discovered (it was said) in Thera. As there was one vase of this kind, there might very well be others; but the vase from Ægina was no longer to be found in any museum at Athens.

There was a good collection of ancient coins in one of these museums, and on the night of 10/11 November 1887 the best part of the collection disappeared. It was stolen by a well-known resident at Athens, Dr Pericles Raphtopoulos, who was afterwards unwise enough to go to Paris and steal a collection there, not realising that the French police-force was more efficient than the Greek. But the facts had not come out when I reached Athens in the early spring (1888) and everybody told me that the Keeper had been selling the finest specimens, one by one, and replacing them by imitations, until at last he saw the game was up, and sold off all the fine coins that remained. (In reality, the imitations had been bought to illustrate some lectures.) There is much public spirit in Greece; and many people were giving their private collections to the nation, to make good the loss. I fancied that the next Keeper might sell all these as well; but the answer was, “Oh, no, we will not have a Greek again,” and they appointed Dr Pick.

Accidents will happen in the very best museums. In 1845 the Portland vase was smashed in the British Museum, and in 1900 the François vase was smashed in the Museo Archeologico at Florence. The damage in London was done by an outsider: not so at Florence, if what I heard was true. I was told (at the time) that the Keeper was reprimanding a mutinous subordinate: the vase was on its pedestal in the centre of the room: the insubordinate person threw a heavy stool at his superior’s head, but unfortunately missed him and hit the vase instead. The bits were put together so very skilfully that, when I saw the vase again, I hardly noticed the repairs.

At the British Museum there used to be officials called Attendants. They were appointed by the Lord Chancellor, the Primate and the Speaker, and usually were men of whom they had some personal knowledge. One of these Attendants had been a servant of a former Primate, and he was like a father to the students, taking care of their drawings and easels, and giving them much good advice. I happened to be dining with some friends in Portland Place, and was amazed to see him officiating as butler there in his most archiepiscopal style. (The butler of the house had got the gout, and he had been called in.) When I saw him next, he spoke apologetically--“Not a very satisfactory dinner, sir, I fear, when I had the pleasure of meeting you last week. All aspics and jellies, sir, and there should have been lamb cutlets.”

One of my friends had a particularly pompous butler. A girl gave my friend a kitten, and he called it Cissy after her. Missing the kitten one morning, he inquired, “Where’s Cissy?” The butler bowed. “I beg your pardon, sir, you may not have observed it, but Cissy is a Lady’s name, and the cat is a Gentleman cat.”

At a sale at Christie’s in 1903 I saw a painting that attracted me, and I bought it, and hung it in the Tallet here. It was catalogued only as a portrait, 30 × 25, English School, and “the property of a gentleman”; but it appears to be a portrait of James Barry (1741-1806) painted by himself, when he was young. There are other portraits of him painted by himself at other times of life: one at the National Portrait Gallery, another at the South Kensington Museum, another at the Society of Arts, and probably others elsewhere. He also painted himself as Timanthes in the _Victors at Olympia_, one of his big pictures at the Society of Arts; and it seems clear to me (though Boswell did not see it) that Dr Johnson was thinking of Pliny’s criticism of Timanthes, when he made his celebrated criticism on Barry’s pictures there, 26 May 1783--“Whatever the hand may have done, the mind has done its part. There is a grasp of mind there which you will find nowhere else.” Pliny had said, “cum sit ars summa, ingenium tamen ultra artem est.”

In those six huge pictures he depicts the progress of the human race from the time of Orpheus onward till it comes to Navigation and Commerce and the Society of Arts, and thus into Elysium, with a glimpse of Tartarus beyond. This last bit was invidious, and he was asked for explanations “respecting the emaciated leg which belongs to the garter and star precipitating into Tartarus, which was said to be a portrait made out of resentment to a great nobleman.” Up in Elysium, Marcus Brutus is leaning on the shoulder of Sir Thomas More; Lycurgus is examining the laws of William Penn, who is supported by King Alfred; Annibale Carracci is talking to Pheidias, with Giles Hussey just behind him; and so on throughout a picture forty-two feet long. And all these people in Elysium wear the clothes they wore on earth. Barry had made progress since the _Death of Wolfe_. West painted that exactly as it happened, with everyone in uniform. Most artists thought it should have been idealized; and, as a protest, Barry painted it with all the figures in the nude.

Barry was in Rome from 1766 to 1770, and Winckelmann was there till 1768; and Winckelmann irritated Barry. Amongst other things, “Abbé Wincleman, who has also passed a magisterial censure upon all the English poets, was, to my own knowledge of him, so little acquainted with the language they wrote in, that he was scarcely able to understand even an ordinary article of intelligence in one of our gazettes.” That comes in his _Inquiry into the real and imaginary obstructions to the acquisition of the Arts in England_, published in 1775. Speaking of this in 1798, he says--“My idea of writing on that subject arose from the ill-founded, scurrilous aspersions on the climate and on the genius and capacity of the people of our islands, which made part of the history of the art, written by the Abbé Wincleman, and (whilst I was at Rome) much read and talked of, to the great annoyance of our little colony at the English coffee-house.” The coffee-house was in the Piazza di Spagna, and the colony then numbered about thirty artists, English, Scotch and Irish.

He says in his _Inquiry_, “They ascribe the grand style of design of the Greeks and Italians to the frequent opportunities that occur in such warm climates of seeing the people naked.... In our countries the practice of boxing alone furnishes more frequent exhibitions of the naked, and of the best kind, than any that are now to be met with in Italy.” I fancy he was wrong about the quantity of nudity, but right about its quality. Better models could be found in England than anywhere abroad, if artists took the trouble to secure them.

Looking at their landscapes, I sometimes think that English artists care less for getting the finest point of view than getting the most comfortable place to pitch their easel and camp-stool. And usually they take professional models for the figure, as these are easiest to get. They have not the enterprise of Giovanni di Bologna in asking an entire stranger to be sculptured in the nude. The _Rape of the Sabines_ shows how wise he was in asking Ginori.

Winckelmann said that he saw people in real life, who were more beautiful than Guido’s _Archangel_ or Raphael’s _Galatea_. And if our artists took the trouble, they might see people here in England, who are more beautiful than anything in modern art. One afternoon I saw a bather walking up the sands; and he caught sight of something in the distance, and stopped abruptly, putting up his hand to shade his eyes. If I could have fixed him there in gilded bronze, he might have faced the _Apoxyomenos_ or any other figure by Lysippos.

When artists find their models fall short of their ideals, they usually begin idealizing them. And when the models are Italians, this answers very well, as the Italians are not unlike the ancient Greeks in build, and the ancient Greeks have given most artists their ideals. But when the models are English, it does not do at all, the English being generally built another way. For one thing, the ilio-femoral ligament is not so short, and an Englishman can therefore straighten out his back to an extent that few Italians can, and no Greeks ever could. Think of the _Doryphoros_ and the _Diadumenos_ being measured for frock-coats, and the amount of padding that the tailor would have to put in the small of the back to make their coats look right.

The professional models in England used mostly to be Italians; but now there are many Jews among them, and a few of other races. A model once explained to me, “Here I am of the Latin race: there I am Slav,” first pointing towards the buttocks and then towards the chest. We must have thoroughbred English models, if we want real English art; but the right people are seldom willing to endure the strain of staying motionless for fifty minutes at a time, though some of the professional models can do that five or six times in a day. The only chance would be with snap-shots or time-studies, taking only a few minutes each.

In looking at the students’ work at the National Competitions of Art Schools, I always feel that some schools treat their students rather badly in giving them such wretched models. It must be discouraging to have to draw these people who are not worth drawing, though not so great a waste of time as drawing plaster casts and other easy things. You set beginners to shoot snipe, reckoning that this will teach them to shoot anything; and you should likewise start beginners at the life-class.

There is a prize for studies from life, given by the Society of Arts out of the income of a fund that was subscribed as a memorial to Mulready; and the studies are exhibited at these National Competitions. But the prize cannot now be given every year, as the income is too small. A patron of the Arts might well augment that fund.

When models sit for great artists, they will ask them now and then why they do this or that and why they do it one way rather than another. Thinking the answers over and comparing them, the models get an insight into things that few critics understand. I have generally found professional models acuter than professional critics in their judgments upon works of art.

In the days of the Pre-Raphaelites the professional critics did their best to crush the young men who could paint, and now-a-days they praise the young men who can neither paint nor draw. Both methods are annoying to real artists, though they will some day make their mark, whatever the critics may say. But the new method is more harmful, as it gives the scamps their chance. They see that critics can talk the public into giving 50 or 100 guineas for things that would not otherwise fetch more than 18 pence; and they can easily hoax the critics.

I believe that public taste is guided more by Baedeker than by any other man or body of men or books. When I go sightseeing abroad, I see people of all nations relying on his Guides. They hardly look at anything unless it has a star *, and when there is a double star **, their admiration knows no bounds. Stars, however, rise and set, and single and double sometimes interchange. I have compared his treatment of the Brera at Milan in his _Northern Italy_ in the first English edition, 1868, and in the fourteenth, 1913. (I had these with me on the earliest and the latest of my visits there.) In 1868 six pictures have a star, and one has a double star. In 1913 the double star remains, and two of the single stars, but the other four have disappeared; and there now are stars to seven pictures that had none in 1868. And people go star-gazing just the same.

My father made old Baedeker’s acquaintance in 1839 or ’40, and formed a very high opinion of him. At that time he was a bookseller in Coblence, and little known outside the Rhineland, the subject of his earliest Guide. Thirty years ago I thought that Hendschel would oust Bradshaw just as Baedeker had ousted Murray; but the Continental Bradshaw was afterwards brought up to date, and Murray’s Guides were not.

There was a big statue of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner, where there is a little statue of him now; and the big statue stood upon the Arch until the Arch was taken down and set up further back in 1883. A great-uncle of mine writes to my maternal grandmother, 23 March 1847, “I have seen the Wellington Statue. It is not at all too large for the Arch, and is a noble thing indeed.” It was new then, and everyone was finding fault with it. It was much too big for the Arch, and it was not a noble thing; but the present statue of the Duke is an ignoble thing. If things are bad, by all means do away with them; but do not replace them by things that may be just as bad, though with another kind of badness. Look at the great west window in Exeter Cathedral: the new glass has not the same demerits as the old, but as a work of art it is every bit as bad, and it is much less interesting.

While the new Cathedral at Westminster was being built, I went in several times to see it, and once I tested its acoustics very unexpectedly. The chancel steps had not been built, so I walked up a plank; and the plank came up like a see-saw when I reached the higher end. It jerked me off, and I said something suitable. And then my words ascended to the apse, and were rolled back along the nave and aisles like a thunderous Amen.--I remember three designs for that Cathedral. First it was to be a Gothic building, rivalling the Abbey. Then it was designed as a Basilica, rather like St Paul’s at Rome as rebuilt since the fire. And then came the Byzantine thing we know: like all Byzantine things, far better inside than out.

An architect in London designed a house near here, and a specification was sent down from town: all walls to rest upon a concrete bed of specified size. The site was solid rock; and tons of granite were blasted out to make way for the concrete bed.--I happened to tell this to a ship-owner, and he remarked with some surprise, “I thought it was only Government officials who did that kind of thing.” And he told me of a ship of his that was employed in carrying troops. The regulations said that there must be (I think) eight feet clear height between the decks, and this ship of his had more, say ten. And temporary decks were built two feet above the permanent decks in order to reduce the height to eight.

There is a letter to my mother from one of her aunts, Southsea, 4 October 1861, “We went to see ‘the Warrior’ in dock, and a most beautiful sight she is. We went all over her, she is immense! It is thought she must roll much in anything of a heavy sea, and Kit and other Naval men think she ought not to be sent into danger, such ships being fitter to defend the coasts instead of new batteries. That unhappy ‘Great Eastern’! Will anyone ever venture in her again?” The Great Eastern had been caught in an Atlantic gale three weeks before, and the passengers found it very uncomfortable--“The two cows that fell with their cowshed down into the ladies’ cabin were killed by the violence of the shock.” I remember the Great Eastern very well, and also the Warrior--I saw her first in 1864, in Torbay. She was the earliest of our ironclads, and was completed in 1861.

In the old days of little wooden ships this part of England had a much larger share in shipping. Before _Lloyd’s Register_ began, there were two rival registers of shipping--the shipowners’ red book, which began in 1799, and the underwriters’ green book, which began some years before, but lost many of its supporters by changing its system of classification in 1797. The underwriters had kept surveyors at twenty-four ports in Great Britain and Ireland; and six of the twenty-four were less than twenty miles from here--Dartmouth, Teignmouth, Exmouth, Starcross, Topsham and Exeter. And in 1799 the shipowners put surveyors at twenty-two of these, omitting Exmouth and Starcross, and adding six other ports, making twenty-eight in all. There were eighty-eight surveying ports in 1834, when _Lloyd’s Register_ was started; and these included Dartmouth, Teignmouth, Topsham and Exeter, but the two last had only one surveyor between them. In another fifty years all four had ceased to be surveying ports, and the nearest surveyor was at Plymouth.

I wrote the article on Ships in the great _Dictionnaire des Antiquités_ edited by Daremberg and Saglio; and while at work on it, I found that I was cramped for space, and therefore asked for more. But the answer was that they had given me as much space for ‘Navis’ as they had given Navarre for ‘Meretrices,’ and my subject could not possibly require more space than his.

There is an old cottage here called Bowhouse, one of the six old dwellings that form the hamlet here. I repaired it in 1919 and cut a window through the west wall, as it was rather dark inside; and three old coins were found there while the work was going on, one of George the Third, one of William the Third, and one of Henry the Third. The George III was underneath the staircase, and might have slipped down through a crack. The William III was found in sweeping up a floor, but there was no knowing how it came to be amongst the rubbish there. The Henry III was embedded in the west wall where the window was cut through. That is a very thick wall, built of cob, and was found to be ‘as hard as brass’ for cutting. The coin was in the middle of the cob, and certainly had been there ever since the wall was built.

The coin is one of the ‘short cross’ pennies that were superseded by the ‘long cross’ pennies in 1249. It has the names of Henry as the king, Adam as the moneyer and London as the mint; and Adam was moneyer there from 1205 to 1237. Henry the Third did not become king until 1216; but the coin may perhaps be earlier than that, as Henry the Second put the name of Henry on these pennies in 1180, and his successors never altered it. The coin is much the worse for wear, and may have been in use for many years before it found its way into the wall.

These silver pennies were worth a good deal then. There was an Inquiry on 20 May 1316 after the death of William le Pruz--the old knight whose effigy is now in Lustleigh church at the south end of the transept--and his meadows at Lustleigh were valued at 3_d._ a year an acre, against £5 now, or just 400 times as many pence. But the real value of the meadows must be pretty much the same.

Under the Corn Production Act of 1917 the Wages Board not only fixed a minimum wage for agricultural work, but also fixed a maximum for the deduction from the wage when the worker is provided with a cottage. In this district the maximum is 3_s._ a week; and I am now paying 3_s._ 5_d._ a week on a cottage in rates and taxes and fire-insurance. I get nothing for the cottage, but only lose by it, and therefore am not eager to build more.

In this district the old cottages are relatively better than the new, judging them by the general standard of comfort at the time when they were built; and some of them are absolutely better, as they have more spacious rooms. My grandfather writes from here, 1 June 1851, “Prince Albert must not think of putting labouring men in parlours, if he expects good hardy soldiers and sailors.” The modern cottages have parlours, seldom used, and bedrooms that will hardly hold a bed.

Innovations have seldom been improvements here. There are very many new things that are better than the old; but here one chiefly sees the new things that are cheaper than the old, and these are not always better. Many of them are not really cheaper. I have just given the roof of this house a new coat of thatch that ought to last for twenty years or more. The thatching here is done with wheat straw; so I grew a crop close by, and sold the grain and kept the straw. Slate or tile costs more; and with such roofing I should have to spend a great deal more on fuel, to keep the house as warm in winter time.

In some ways a thatched roof is better than a cellar as a place for storing wine: the temperature just suits the wine, and there is not any damp. My grandfather tried keeping some above his bedroom ceiling; but it was an inconvenient place for fetching bottles down, and accidents may happen when thatchers are about.

After looking at my vases here, a foreigner made me a little speech. “Oh, your country, how wonderful it is. Who should think to find choice works of ancient Greece with a roof of what you call the Thetch. In another house I find antiquities of Egypt, in another the Oriental porcelain and the lacquer, in another I find pictures most superb. Where originals do not exist, I find reproductions of the greatest works. Surely your England is the most artistic country in the world.”--I fear that England is Artistic in another sense. One day a shopman was showing me things all covered with clumsy ornament, and I asked if there was nothing of good design, without all these excrescences. He seemed puzzled at this, and then it dawned upon him, “Oh, I see, sir. You want something less Artistic.”

This was a secluded place until the railway came. My grandfather writes on 23 September 1849, “I find most people like Wreyland, that is, those advancing in years: so quiet and so sheltered.” And then on 3 January 1864, “I cannot fancy that any railway improves scenery, but this will not so disturb it as one might imagine.... They fancy it is cutting up the country and letting in more people, which will destroy the scenery and the quiet of the neighbourhood; but they think more of its introducing new society than destroying the scenery.”

People who live amidst fine scenery are apt to treat it with contempt, partly from familiarity and partly (I think) because they do not see the scenery as other people see it. You form a higher opinion of a man if you have only seen him at his best, than if you have also seen him at his worst and in all intermediate states. It is the same with scenery. Most strangers see this district in the height of summer, whereas the natives see it in the winter time as well, and have both aspects of it in their mind when they are looking at it; and they sometimes show impatience when strangers praise it overmuch. A farmer here was leaning over a gate from which there is a glorious view. Seeing the view, a passer-by remarked to him how glorious it was. The farmer answered, “Durn the view. I bain’t lookin’ at no view. I be lookin’ how they dratted rabbits ’as ated up my tunnips.”

When the railway came, a plan was drawn up showing how the hillsides were to be laid out with winding roads and villas in the accepted Torquay style; and two such villas were built, but happily no further harm was done.--Torquay had spread out with its winding roads all over the unsheltered hills, and was trading on the reputation it had gained when it was all in shelter. After wintering there, a lady told me it was the first time she had wintered in a place where the ink froze on her writing table.

The old houses here are generally down in hollows, as the old people thought more of shelter than of anything else: they never dreamt of building houses in unsheltered places for the sake of views. In 1849-50 a house was built on the hill behind Lustleigh, facing Lustleigh Cleave. My grandfather writes, 5 January 1851, “I told them last summer, when they were talking of their view, that they had not yet experienced a South Wester. Now they have experienced one, they have packed off, bag and baggage: one window blown in and smashed to pieces, wood and all, and others damaged.”

Since then that house has been much altered and enlarged, and now has a set of turrets. Turrets were a novelty here; and, looking at it, someone said to me, “Bain’t shaped proper, like a house: more like a cruet, I call’n.” Architects so often spoil their work by thinking only of design, without considering whether it will suit the district and the site. Two great houses have been built within ten miles of here in recent years. One is by an Oxford architect--now dead--and would look very well in Oxford, in the Broad, or even in the country, if it stood on level ground and had big trees behind. Half-way up a steep hill-side, it is hardly a success. The other is by Lutyens. It stands on a hill-top that was better without it; but, if there had to be a house there, this was the very thing.

Another edifice is by a man I cannot call an Architect: a simple Tect, and nothing more. There happened to be a corrugated iron shed close by; and a man remarked to me, “That is one of the few buildings of which I can conscientiously say that its appearance is improved by having a corrugated iron shed in front of it.”

All over Devon our A1 villages are being converted into C3 towns; but this is being done by people who have only C3 minds and little experience of anything above C3. I hate their works, but resent their want of culture far less than I resent the want of breeding in the people who appreciate a view and build a house where they can see it, well knowing that their house will spoil the view for everybody else.

There was a copse of nut-bushes growing wild amongst the rocks on the way to Lustleigh Cleave. In early years I felt quite sure that Providence had put it there to give us a supply of nuts to take to the Nut Cracker--a logan-stone at the top of the Cleave, so delicately poised that it just cracked the nuts and did not crush them. And now the bushes are cut down and the rocks rolled over, and in their place there is a cluster of corrugated iron huts.

When a War Memorial was projected here, I thought that the names of the dead might be carved on one of the great rocks on Lustleigh Cleave, with the date and nothing more. As it is, they have been carved on a neat little wooden tablet with an inscription of the usual kind, and put up in the church. I fancy our memorial might have been more worthy of them, had their names been on the granite in the solitude up there with that wild ravine below.

We have another memorial here, of which we all are proud. It is at the railway station. “Beneath this slab, and stretched out flat, lies Jumbo, once our station cat.” That cat had many lives: jumped in and out between the wheels of trains, and yet died in its bed.

A tombstone is primarily a label for identifying what is down below; but survivors will not always face that brutal fact. They merely give the name and age; and in after years this may not be enough. I had to find the next-of-kin to an old servant of ours who was over ninety when she died. (She had always kept them at a distance, as they often wished to borrow money that she did not wish to lend.) There was an entry in a Family Bible, say, A.B. born 1 January 1820; and there were tombstones of three persons named A.B. who died at ages answering to that.--They ought to give the birthday and the parents’ Christian names, to show exactly who is there. Instead of that, they usually give texts and verses out of hymns.

This has always been a healthy district, and so very quiet that people had no worries; and they usually lived on till a great age. I have heard it said regretfully, “Ah, her died young,” and then heard it explained, “Her ne’er saw sixty.” Times are changing now. Looking at the tombstones of some kindred of my own, I was observing how the ages fell from nineties and eighties to seventies and sixties. I said nothing aloud, but the sexton read my thoughts and put them into words, “Aye, zir, they do say as each generation be weaker and wiser than the last.”

* * * * *

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND

FIRST SERIES

Demy 8vo. Illustrated. 8_s._ net.

“Mr Torr chats to us. We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire while he turns through his grandfather’s and his father’s letters and reads us little extracts, and lets his talk wander as it will from suggestion to suggestion.... A quaint ingenuity and originality of idea plays about it all: a sly wit flashes here and there. But always, behind everything, we feel Wreyland, the Devon home, the rooted life. We should like to give some examples; but choosing them is as difficult as choosing raspberries when all are ripe; for, in the classic phrase of the reviewer, there is not a dull page in Mr Torr’s book. We confess to skipping a single paragraph. On turning back to read it we found that we had missed a fragrant bit of social history.... As to good stories, open any page that you will and you will find one.... The only point of capping a good talker’s stories is to egg him on to tell more. We hope that Mr Torr will take the hint.”--_Times Literary Supplement._

“He has travelled far afield in Europe, and he comes back to Wreyland and dips into his grandfather’s and his father’s letters, and his own memory as well, and tells us what he thinks of things that were and are. And what we like is the easy balance of his mind. The old times were not always the good times, and modern days are not altogether bad; so Mr Torr has taken each as it has come, and has been content therewith.”--_Morning Post._

“Wreyland is Mr Torr’s home near Dartmoor, and his book gives us a sort of comic mirror of life at Wreyland during his own life and the life of his grandfather. For Mr Torr sees life comically as surely as Jane Austen herself.... It would be difficult, indeed, to define the reasons of its astonishing attractiveness. Probably one of them is that Mr Torr was born with a genius for enjoyment, and that he somehow infects us with his happiness in his most trivial pages.”--_Daily News._

“This short book is worth a dozen of the silly volumes that now flood the book-market. It preserves country lore of the sort that is fast decaying, mingled with travel notes, a few details of scholarship and family history. The ordinary local historian is industrious, but wanting in other ways. Mr Torr is a scholar: he has, too, an excellent sense of humour, an inquiring mind and an observant eye.”--_Saturday Review._

“A man who takes a keen interest in his ancestral place and in his humble neighbours, and who at the same time is in touch with the world of scholarship through his special studies, may be said to make the most of life.... Mr Torr, like a true scholar, wastes no words. The essence of the ordinary book of memoirs, as he knows, is in the anecdotes. He therefore gives the anecdotes without the usual framework, telling them neatly and briefly, and passing from one subject to another without even a chapter-heading to break the flow of good talk.”--_Spectator._

“Mr Torr’s book is as typically English as a Christmas pudding.... His book is far more than a local history, however; it should be read as a complementary volume to _Mansfield Park_ and _Pendennis_, to _Life’s Little Ironies_ and _The Way of all Flesh_.... From Mr Torr we learn just how good life could be for a wealthy, self-contained, enterprising Englishman in the last hundred years or so. It was all more or less comic relief to him. Old walls are almost serious, and old roofs, and the beauty of fine days and fine landscape; the rest is good fun.”--_Athenæum._

“He has travelled and written books, he is a depository of odd lore, sometimes local, sometimes classical, sometimes smacking of the great world. Intermixed with his own chatty reminiscences he gives us extracts from old family letters and other glimpses of days which the war has caused to seem further off than they are. Reading this charming little book is very much like listening to the squire gossiping by his own fireside.”--_Guardian._

“And when we close his book and try to recollect what it was in it that made it so hard to lay down, we begin to be aware that his converse with us has flowed on in just that artless inevitable way: one thing, as the saying goes, leads to another.... He has charm; and the charm of this extraordinary book we despair of conveying by any quotation or any description; we can only say it is there.”--_Field._

“He goes from story to story, from oddment to oddment, wasting no time in generalisations or connecting platitudes. The result is an extraordinary medley that might almost (save only for a few dates) have been written fifty years ago, or fifty years hence, by a man of Mr Torr’s knowledge, habits, and temperament, and that could have been read with as much pleasure by a man of George I’s reign as it probably will be by people who accidentally run across it in the reign of George XII.”--_Land and Water._

“If by ‘small talk’ is meant gossip, Mr Torr will not be offended if we say that this is one of the pleasantest books of gossip which we ever came across.... The district is a little out of the world, and it is no wonder that some of the pleasant superstitions of rural England have not died out there.... The family were great travellers, and many parallel examples from other countries are adduced to illustrate the superstitions of Devonshire.”--_Country Life._

“Mr Torr was well advised by his friends to publish these jottings, originally intended for private circulation. They will specially interest Devonians, as they are mostly about the manners and customs, superstitions and traditions of that fascinating county in the days before railways, but they give you glimpses also of later days and of places of more general interest, of Italy, for example, when under the intolerable tyranny of Austria, and of France when in the throes of the Franco-Prussian War, and even a glimpse of Napoleon the First.”--_Truth._

“We are grateful that in days like these he has drawn from his store of reminiscences such a delightful and varied assortment of small talk. He brings to his aid, too, diaries and letters of relatives as keenly observant and as alert and shrewd as himself.”--_Queen._

“My first thought was, ‘What on earth is the University Press doing with small talk in an obscure village?’ My second was, ‘How enterprising they were to get hold of such an odd and excellent book!’... I do not know any book in which so many characteristic and uniformly good stories of Devonshire people are to be found.... But he has gone far beyond the locality. He is liable to touch on anything in the world except his inner self. That is a pity. A little more egoism would have made his book even better.”--_The New Statesman._

“‘I meant,’ writes the author of this attractive miscellany, ‘to keep to local matters, but it has gone much further than that.’ It has. _Small Talk at Wreyland_ travels over half the world and many centuries of history.... The ordinary reader who merely wishes to roam the world without leaving his own fireside will find Mr Torr a delightful companion.”--_Outlook._

“It is seldom that one comes on so good a volume of gossip as _Small Talk at Wreyland_.... _Emma_ itself hardly throws more light on the comic side of human nature than do some of these old letters.... But it is for its glimpses of life in Wreyland, not of the larger world, that one will return again and again to Mr Torr’s most entertaining book.”--_Everyman._

“So we look for the kind of book an accomplished scholar produces, and we are not disappointed, though Mr Torr has left his materials in ‘most admired disorder.’... With Mr Torr some new theme is always turning up--we never know quite how or when.... We are obliged to him for some capital gossip, and we shall be glad to have more.”--_Notes and Queries._

“Mr Torr, of Wreyland (a Devonshire hamlet), has a super-excellent memory, a pleasant sense of humour, and a useful aptitude for keeping old diaries and letters. Not only does Mr Torr keep these, but he actually reads them, and extracts from them the juiciest morsels for our delectation.... Perhaps, after all, it is manner even more than matter which makes the charm of this book.”--_Literary World._

“Wreyland is a hamlet in Devonshire; and Mr Torr’s book of gossip gives us the life at Wreyland in his own, his father’s, and his grandfather’s days. The concrete pleasure and happiness of it, the deep association between man and man, and between man and nature, bring one back to reality and life. There is a richness in country life, whether of peasant or squire, which makes the epigram of the pulpit and the philosophy of the school seem thin and foolish. The unconscious wisdom of life radiates through Mr Torr’s pages, and it is a bigger thing and a better than any despair or mockery, than any explanations or excuse.”--_Bookman._

“The book is exceedingly interesting, diverting, and informing. To me it has been better than many discourses of the learned, and some exhortations of the pious.”--_Methodist Recorder._

“A book, if it is a good book, must be natural, unforced, something that has ‘grow’d’ as Topsy herself grow’d in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Well, _Small Talk at Wreyland_ has grow’d, as a regard for it grows as one turns its pages and reads of peaceful days and pleasant journeys, and, sometimes, of notable people. It has all the qualities of good talk by a good host who has gathered a few friends about him in his home in some interesting part of the country.”--_Church Family Newspaper._

“I wish we could fence off a district of Mr Torr’s Devonshire, and preserve it and its population as an exhibit.... I wish quite passionately that the inhabitants of Wreyland as a type could be preserved. It is a rest to pause and contemplate them. They are so mellow.”--_Saturday Westminster Gazette._

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4

C. F. CLAY, MANAGER