ornamented with a rude effigy of the ruthless
murderer of Prince Arthur. Two candles
weighing a pound each are lit, and until
they are burnt out the visitors at this festive
Dutch auction have a right to sit bemusing
themselves with "jolly good ale and old." A
marble tablet in the vestry room records the
sacred customs to be observed on this
occasion, but does not insist on inebriety.

A flight further westward and the crow feels
the fresh wind from the Blackdown Hills ruffle
the fan feathers of his strong wings. He rests at
Wellington on a pleasant red roof and looks up
at the Wellington monument. After Talavera,
where Arthur Wellesley won his peerage, he
chose the name of this town for his title, because
his family is supposed to derive its name from
Wellesleigh, a place near Wells, and this town
is near Wensley, which sounds like Wesley, the
name afterwards altered to Wellesley. On being
made viscount the duke tried to purchase an
estate here, but failed. In the civil wars the
Wellington people were notorious Roundheads.

The crow has passed the frontier, and spreads
his wings in sunny Devonshire air. Red
Devons feed below him in the green meadows.
Mossy apple boughs of countless orchards
spread beneath him; homely cob walls square
out the pastures; thatched cottages cheerily
greet the eye.

On the honeycombed battlement of St.
Peter's, the central church of the old clothing
town of Tiverton, the crow first descends,
lightly. This is one of those Devonshire towns
that has suffered so much from fire, in
consequence of the use of thatched roofs. In June,
1731, when the thatch had dried almost to
tinder, a fire broke out in Tiverton, and
destroyed at one fell swoop two hundred and
ninety-eight of those picturesque, but dangerous,
old thatched timber houses. Tiverton has
produced at least one celebrated person, for
Hannah Cowley, the authoress of the Belle's
Stratagem, a lively and clever play that long
held the Georgian stage, was born here in
1743. She was the daughter of Philip
Parkhouse, a bookseller in the town, and she
married an officer in the service of the Company.

The crow having rested on theatre roofs
before now, has pleasure in the old clothing town
between the Exe and Loman, in recalling
snatches of the pleasant play by the
bookseller's daughter, for was not Elliston the
incomparable lover, the Doricourt at Drury Lane
in 1815, Lewis the Doricourt at Covent Garden
in 1780; Wrench, Flutter; and Mrs. Orger,
the Lady Frances Touchwood; and is there
not a stage tradition that Miss Younge, as
Letitia, always burst into real tears when she
took off the mask, in the last scene, and
discovered herself to Doricourt? The feigned
madness of Doricourt, and the feigned rusticity of
Letitia, seem stale enough now, but they
delighted audiences once, and Tiverton was proud
of the play the royal family had commanded
once a season for many years. In 1780 what
could have brought the gallery down sooner
than such expressive patriotic sentiments as
those of Doricourt: "True. There I plead
guilty; but I have never yet found any man
whom I could cordially take to my heart and
call friend, who was not born beneath a British
sky, and whose heart and manners were not
truly English?" Or, again: "Cursed be the
hour—should it ever arrive—in which British
ladies shall sacrifice to foreign graces the grace
of modesty?"

That old church on which the crow rests,
has a chapel and south porch carved all over
with coats of arms, and ships, and woolpacks,
and staple marks, by John Greenway, a cloth
merchant in 1517, and has seen a good deal of
fighting in its time. In the reign of Edward
the Sixth, the Devonshire priests roused the
commonalty in Devonshire, when Wiltshire and
other counties began to rise. Ten thousand of
them met under Humphrey Arundel, the
Governor of St. Michael's Mount, armed
themselves with bows, halberds, hackbuts, and
spears, and despising Lord Russell's small
force, moved on towards Exeter, carrying before
them crosses, banners, holy water, candlesticks,
the host covered with a canopy, and all the
pomp of Catholic ritualism. Exeter shut her
gates against them, they failed in all their
attacks, and Lord Russell, reinforced by Sir
William Herbert and Lord Gray, bore down
at last on the fanatical peasantry with some
rough German horse and prompt Italian
arquebusiers. The battle was fought at Cranmore,
near Collipriest. Tiverton saw that day the
insurgents fly before the whirling two-handed
swords of the fierce German mercenaries, and
the Protector had soon good tidings from
Devonshire.

In the civil wars Tiverton streets grew red
again with blood freely spilt, for in 1643 the
Parliament troops were chased out of it by
Cavalier swords; in 1644 it was occupied in
force by the king, first, and then by the Earl of
Essex; and in 1645 Massey and Fairfax took
it by storm. Fairfax, in his stolid way, soon
dismantled the castle of the Earls of Devon,
built by Richard de Redvers in 1100, and left
only those ivied towers which the Carews and
the crows now jointly possess; the great
fourteenth century gateway still remains.

It was during the storm that Fairfax
battered the church so much, the cavaliers having
fortified themselves in it, dragged their guns
on to the roof, and thrust their muskets out of
every loop and window. It was then that the fine
carved tombs of the Courtenays were trodden
and struck to pieces. There was a monument
to Catherine, the daughter of Edward the
Fourth, and widow of an Earl of Devonshire,
and another to the admiral, the third earl,
generally called "the blind and good earl."
His epitaph was one of those in which the
corpse itself is supposed to talk to you:

            Hoe, hoe! who lies here?
            I, the good Earl of Devonshire,
           With Maud, my wife, to me full dere.
           We lyved together fyfty-fyve yere.
           What wee gave, wee have;
           What wee spent wee had;
           What wee lei'te wee loste.