Page:Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries.djvu/21

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6 Dtvon Notes and Queries. and held both parishes. He is the author of a little treatise entitled ^* Evil Thoughts/* to which is appended a short memoir of the author. The Exeter Commissioners of Improvement were desirous of widening South Street, and as the church of St. George projected very much, they made several applications to the rector, the Rev. John Kingdon Cleeve, D.D., to set back the building. He suggested as a compromise that for every foot he gave up in the front, he should receive double at the back; these terms were rejected, so the Rector said that as long as he lived his Church should not be touched. The Rev. John Kingdon Cleeve, D.D., of Baliol College, Oxford, was instituted to St. George's church in the year 1818 and held the living for twenty-four years, he died in 1842, and in the following year the old building was taken down and the site enclosed with iron railings. The following inscription is on a flat grave-stone in the enclosure : — Here lyeth the body of Thomas Gist of this par- rish Fuller who departed this life the 20th January 1671 T homas could not believe, but when he spy*d H is Saviours wounds, my Lord my God he cry'd O h Faith wer't not for thee heavens endless joyes M ight be esteem'd no more than childish toyes A nd he whose t)ody here in Hope doth rest S hould not in heaven be a welcome Gvest 6. — A Letter from Sir Wm. Courtenay, PowDSRHAiff, TO Gilbert Yarde, Esq., of Bradley, Dated ist Septembbr, 1674. — The following letter is taken from a Common-Place Book, kept by the Rev. Richard Lane, of Coffleet, Devon, about 1790 — a thick folio manuscript volume, neatly written, now in the possession of Mr. J. J. Ogilvie Evans, of Teignmouth. The original letter, of which this is a transcript is said to be preserved at Powderham. The writer, Sir William Courtenay, was born about thirteen years before the outbreak of the Great Civil War. Prince, who was his contemporary, says of him (See Worthies^ Ed. 1810, p. 263) that he '* hath wanted nothing but his health, to have rendered him as illustrious as most of bis ancestors," but he lived in troublous timeS| and notwith*