Exeter Cathedral and Public Walk.—Libraries.—Honiton.—Dangers of English Travelling, and Cruelty with which it is attended.—Axminster.—Bridport. Saturday, April 24.
If the outside of this New London Inn, as it is called, surprised me, I was far more surprised at the interior. Excellent as the houses appeared at which we had already halted, they were mean and insignificant compared with this. There was a sofa in our apartment, and the sideboard was set forth with china and plate. Surely, however, these articles of luxury are misplaced, as they are not in the slightest degree necessary to the accommodation of a traveller, and must be considered in his bill.
25Exeter is an ancient city, and has been so slow in adopting modern improvements that it has the unsavoury odour of Lisbon. One great street runs through the city from east to west; the rest consists of dirty lanes. As you cross the bridge, you look down upon a part of the town below, intersected by little channels of water. The cathedral is a fine object from those situations where both towers are seen, and only half the body of the building, rising above the city. It cannot be compared with Seville, or Cordova, or Burgos; yet certainly it is a noble pile. Even the heretics confess that the arches, and arched windows, and avenues of columns, the old monuments, the painted altar, and the coloured glass, impress them with a feeling favourable to religion. For myself, I felt that I stood upon ground, which, desecrated as it was, had once been holy.
Close to our inn is the entrance of the Norney or public walk. The trees are elms, and have attained their full growth: indeed 26I have never seen a finer walk; but every town has not its Norney[2] as with us its alameda. I was shown a garden, unique in its kind, which has been made in the old castle ditch. The banks rise steeply on each side; one of the finest poplars in the country grows in the bottom, and scarcely overtops the ruined wall. Jackson, one of the most accomplished men of his age, directed these improvements; and never was accident more happily improved. He was chiefly celebrated as a musician; but as a man of letters, his reputation is considerable; and he was also a painter: few men, if any, have succeeded so well in so many of the fine arts. Of the castle itself there are but few remains; it was named Rougemont, from the colour of the red sandy eminence on which it stands, and for the same reason the city itself was called by the Britons The Red City.
2.  The author seems to have mistaken this for a general name.—Tr.
27In most of the English towns they have what they call circulating libraries: the subscribers, for an annual or quarterly payment, have two or more volumes at a time, according to the terms; and strangers may be accommodated on depositing the value of the book they choose. There are several of these in Exeter, one of which, I was told, was considered as remarkably good, the bookseller being himself a man of considerable learning and ability. Here was also a literary society of some celebrity, till the French revolution, which seems to have disturbed every town, village, and almost every family in the kingdom, broke it up. The inhabitants in general are behindhand with their countrymen in information and in refinement. The streets are not flagged, neither are they regularly cleaned, as in other parts of the kingdom; the corporation used to compel the townspeople to keep their doors clean, as is usual in every English town; but some little while ago it was 28discovered, that, by the laws of the city, they had no authority to insist upon this; and now the people will not remove the dirt from their own doors, because they say they cannot be forced to do it. Their politics are as little progressive as their police: to this day, when they speak of the Americans, they call them the rebels. Everywhere else, this feeling is extinguished among the people, though it still remains in another quarter. When Washington died, his will was published in the newspapers; but in those which are immediately under ministerial influence, it was suppressed by high authority. It was not thought fitting that any respect should be paid to the memory of a man whom the Sovereign considered as a rebel and a traitor.
The celebrated Priestley met with a singular instance of popular hatred in this place. A barber who was shaving him heard his name in the midst of the operation;—he dropt his razor immediately, and 29ran out of the room exclaiming, “that he had seen his cloven foot.”
I bought here a map of England, folded for the pocket, with the roads and distances all marked upon it. I purchased also a book of the roads, in which not only the distance of every place in the kingdom from London, and from each other, is set down, but also the best inn at each place is pointed out, the name mentioned of every gentleman’s seat near the road, and the objects which are most worthy a traveller’s notice. Every thing that can possibly facilitate travelling seems to have been produced by the commercial spirit of this people.
As the chief trade of Exeter lies with Spain, few places have suffered so much by the late war. We departed about noon the next day; and as we ascended the first hill, looked down upon the city and its cathedral towers to great advantage. Our stage was four leagues, along a road which, a century ago, when there was little travelling, 30and no care taken of the public ways, was remarkable as the best in the West of England. The vale of Honiton, which we overlooked on the way, is considered as one of the richest landscapes in the kingdom: it is indeed a prodigious extent of highly cultivated country, set thickly with hedges and hedge-row trees; and had we seen it either in its full summer green, or with the richer colouring of autumn, perhaps I might not have been disappointed. Yet I should think the English landscape can never appear rich to a southern eye: the verdure is indeed beautiful and refreshing, but green fields and timber trees have neither the variety nor the luxuriance of happier climates. England seems to be the paradise of sheep and cattle; Valencia of the human race.
Honiton, the town where we changed chaises, has nothing either interesting or remarkable in its appearance, except that here, as at Truro, a little stream flows along the street, and little cisterns or basons, 31for dipping places, are made before every door. Lace is manufactured here in imitation of the Flanders lace, to which it is inferior because it thickens in washing; the fault is in the thread. I have reason to remember this town, as our lives were endangered here by the misconduct of the innkeeper. There was a demur about procuring horses for us; a pair were fetched from the field, as we afterwards discovered, who had either never been in harness before, or so long out of it as to have become completely unmanageable. As soon as we were shut in, and the driver shook the reins, they ran off—a danger which had been apprehended; for a number of persons had collected round the inn door to see what would be the issue. The driver, who deserved whatever harm could happen to him, for having exposed himself and us to so much danger, had no command whatever over the frightened beasts; he lost his seat presently, and was thrown upon the pole between the horses; still he kept the reins, 32and almost miraculously prevented himself from falling under the wheels, till the horses were stopped at a time when we momently expected that he would be run over and the chaise overturned. As I saw nothing but ill at this place, so have I heard nothing that is good of it: the borough is notoriously venal; and since it has become so the manners of the people have undergone a marked and correspondent alteration.
This adventure occasioned considerable delay. At length a chaise arrived; and the poor horses, instead of being suffered to rest, weary as they were, for they had just returned from Exeter, were immediately put-to for another journey. One of them had been rubbed raw by the harness. I was in pain the whole way, and could not but consider myself as accessory to an act of cruelty: at every stroke of the whip my conscience upbraided me, and the driver was not sparing of it. It was luckily a short stage of only two leagues and a 33quarter. English travelling, you see, has its evils and its dangers. The life of a post-horse is truly wretched:—there will be cruel individuals in all countries, but cruelty here is a matter of calculation: the post-masters find it more profitable to overwork their beasts and kill them by hard labour in two or three years, than to let them do half the work and live out their natural length of life. In commerce, even more than in war, both men and beasts are considered merely as machines, and sacrificed with even less compunction.
There is a great fabric of carpets at Axminster, which are woven in one entire piece. We were not detained here many minutes, and here we left the county of Devonshire, which in climate and fertility and beauty is said to exceed most parts of England: if it be indeed so, England has little to boast of. Both their famous pirates, the Drake and the Raleigh, were natives of this province; so also was Oxenham, another of these early Buccaneers, of 34whose family it is still reported, that before any one dies a bird with a white breast flutters about the bed of the sick person, and vanishes when he expires.
We now entered upon Dorsetshire, a dreary country. Hitherto I had been disposed to think that the English inclosures rather deformed than beautified the landscape, but I now perceived how cheerless and naked the cultivated country appears without them. The hills here are ribbed with furrows, just as it is their fashion to score the skin of roast pork. The soil is chalky and full of flints: night was setting-in, and our horses struck fire at almost every step. This is one of the most salubrious parts of the whole island: it has been ascertained by the late census, that the proportion of deaths in the down-countries to the other parts is as 65 to 80,—a certain proof that inclosures are prejudicial to health.[3] After having travelled 35three leagues we reached Bridport, a well-built and flourishing town. At one time all the cordage for the English navy was manufactured here; and the neighbourhood is so proverbially productive of hemp, that when a man is hanged, they have a vulgar saying, that he has been stabbed with a Bridport dagger. It is probable that both hemp and flax degenerate in England, as seed is annually imported from Riga.
3.  The dryness of soil is a more probable cause.—Tr.
Here ends our third day’s journey. The roads are better, the towns nearer each other, more busy and more opulent as we advance into the country; the inns more modern though perhaps not better, and travelling more frequent. We are now in the track of the stage-coaches; one passed us this morning, shaped like a trunk with a rounded lid placed topsy-turvy. The passengers sit sideways; it carries sixteen persons withinside, and as many on the roof as can find room; yet this unmerciful weight, with the proportionate luggage of 36each person, is dragged by four horses, at the rate of a league and a half within the hour. The skill with which the driver guides them with long reins, and directs these huge machines round the corners of the streets, where they always go with increased velocity, and through the sharp turns of the inn gateways, is truly surprising. Accidents, nevertheless, frequently happen; and considering how little time this rapidity allows for observing the country, and how cruelly it is purchased, I prefer the slow and safe movements of the calessa.