buried heresy. There, sleeps James Peirce, the
great heresiarch of the west—the leader of free
thought in Exeter a century and a half ago,
when the great Presbyterian schism convulsed
the Churches; a library might be filled with its
tracts and sermons of the time, most of them
dogmatical and furious, and few of them
charitable or convincing. Mr. Peirce died with
the stains of heresy upon him; but though
it was not possible to deny him burial in the
common homestead, the clergyman refused to
allow the inscription which his friends and
family had prepared to celebrate the virtues
of their "reverend, learned, and pious" pastor.
"Never," said the clerical bigot, "shall
he be called reverend, for he was a schismatic;
learned, for he was not educated in a
university; nor pious, for he did not worship
the Trinity"! And so, though the monument
was one of the most prominent in the cemetery,
it bore the simple words, "Mr. James Peirce's
Tomb." No more. Some reckless hand has
removed the tomb—whether under the inspirations
of bigotry, I know not; but, after
years of absence, I sought the old memento,
and found it not; but there still exists a
marble tablet in the vestry of George's Meeting-
house, in which, after recording the many
excellences of the good, learned, and reverend
James Peirce, the inscription proceeds to record
that he was interred in St. Leonard's
churchyard, and "after death denied a just eulogium
by the clergyman of that parish." The
name of that clergyman is buried in the oblivion
to which he would have condemned a name that
stands out prominently among those who, in
dark and dreary days, fought the battles of
religious freedom, and taught their descendants
how to struggle and how to succeed.

Tombs more distinguished were those of
the Baring family—the foundations of whose
fortunes were laid, as most of their mortal
remains were deposited, in this locality. Over
their resting-places towered some of those
magnificent elm-trees which the Devonian soil, as has
been often remarked, raises in unparalleled beauty
and grandeur. I remember well that, when those
tombs were supposed to be imperilled by the
destruction of the old, and the construction of
the new chapel, my father built a hut over them
for their protection. No vestige of them now
remains. They have been replaced by a simple
square of stone, which concentrates in a line
the names and dates of the founders of a family
whose mercantile success and political eminence
have given them a world-wide fame.

They came to Exeter from Bremen, and Matthew
fixed himself at Larkbear (the Larrochbere
of Saxon times), to carry on the woollen
trade with foreign lands—a trade of which in the
west of England Exeter was the centre.

The reputation and success of the house of the
Barings was mainly owing to the business habits,
the prudence, and the activity of the wife of
Matthew, whose name was traditionally known
as Madame Baring. The ladies, in those days,
took an active part in the management of their
husbands' affairs. They superintended the
labours of the women engaged as burlers, who
pulled the "goods" over benches, and with
burling-irons, a sort of large sharply-pointed
tweezers held in the right hand, picked out the
blacks, the knots, and other defects left by the
weavers, which, with a whisk in the left hand,
they swept into open bags at their sides. It was
one of the duties of the mistress, now and then,
to go from one end to the other of the long
line of burlers, encouraging the diligent, and
reprehending the lazy. Matthew Baring fully
appreciated the services of his wife, and built for
her on the banks of the river, a handsome fishing-
house of brick, from whose windows she could
uninterruptedly and comfortably indulge in
piscatorial amusements. Pollutions have driven away
the fish, the fishing-house has been razed to
its foundations, the fisher lady has been long
slumbering under the turf of the St. Leonard's
cemetery, and the memento raised over her
burial-place by her eldest son, John, the senior
partner of the great house of John and Francis
Baring, has wholly disappeared. Most of the
members of the family are interred in the
churchyard just described, which was separated
from their domicile of Mount Radford only by a
bridge thrown across the public road, but some
of them repose in the "Saint's Rest" of the
Exeter Presbyterians, and others in a very pretty
but obscure burial-place attached to a Unitarian
chapel a few miles from the city.

John and Francis Baring were both men of
singular sagacity. Perhaps they foresaw the
decline and decay of that staple trade upon
which their father had laid the foundations of
his own and their prosperity—at all events, they
sought a wider field than Exeter offered. I had
in my possession a copy of a tender for part of a
loan to the British government, in the reign of
George the Third, in which the ambition of the
great house of the Brothers Baring was limited
to the adventure of three hundred pounds sterling.
Two peerages and a baronetcy, and what
millions upon millions have been since associated
with the name! The history of Francis, his
connexion with Dunning, his influence with
William Pitt, how he sent his sons to travel in
the Eastern and the Western world, the reputation
they acquired, the alliances they formed,
may be studied elsewhere; but of John, the
Exonian, the future representative of his native
city, a word or two may here be said.

He became almost the sole landed proprietor
of the parish in which he lived, and in which he
built his country-seat. The lands, which were
afterwards sold, are now covered with houses;
but in my boyhood it was a boast, my father
being one of the Baring tenants, that in our
community we had neither lawyer, nor parson, nor
doctor, nor pauper, nor poor-rate, nor pound, nor
barrack, nor soldier, nor tavern, nor alehouse, nor
anything which would be called a nuisance. The