English edition which Mr. Wright has recently so ably edited), Sir Dinas is the knight who is described as the “Kings Seneschal or warder”—Constable of the Tower, in fact, to his Majesty, as we now say. If then the ghost of our worthy inquirer takes a pleasure in such discussions, in whatever region of the departed he may abide, I would respectfully suggest to him—may not the title of Castle-an-Dinas have meant simply the Castle of Dinas and no more? the place in fact bearing the name of the knight who was its ex-officio governor? And in that case I may be permitted perhaps to mention another not unimportant circumstance. The more famous Castle of Tintagel,
Of dark Dundagil by the Cornish sea,
is only a few miles distant, about nine or ten, according to the Ordnance map. In the romaunt, after the Duke of Cornwall has received, at the hands of the Prophet, the notification of the circumstances which are to precede the birth of the great mediæval hero, it is said “When the Duke had this warning, anon he went and furnished and garnished two strong castles of his, of the whilke the ane was Tyntagell, and the other called Terrabylle. So his wife, Dame Igrayne, hee put into the Castle of Tyntagell, and hee put hymself into the Castle Terrabylle, which had many issues and posterns out. Then in alle haste came Uther withe a greate hoaste and layde a siege about this Castle Terrabylle,” whose locality Mr. Wright professes himself unable to identify. And a little further on it is added that Merlin being at the latter place with the King, speaks of Tintagel as “but ten miles hence.” What is the inference then, the one which as distinguished from any others I have referred to, I am anxious should be drawn from these passages, but that this “old entrenched camp near St. Columb” was originally the “fortresse hight Terrabylle” itself? known only in later times, as I have suggested, by the name of the seneschal or governor who ruled it after “this whole Kingdom of Cornwaille” had fallen into the “king’s” hands?
Is this speaking not merely in the cause of “old romance” itself, but of the history of which it is very doubtless, as Arnold has taught us, the foundation—altogether an unprofitable inquiry? At least I am sure that the beatified opponent whom I am more particularly addressing at this moment, will admit my references as valid, if not my deductions from them; for does he not himself appeal on one occasion, and in these very pages before me, to “the unimpeachable testimony of the Romaunts of the Round Table?”
Meanwhile I am telling you nothing of my reasons for visiting St. Columb in the first place. It was not, let me state, that I might be enabled to give my readers this theory about Castle-an-Dinas, which is not a pet one, and of which, indeed, I had never thought until this present moment. Neither was it to speculate, or in any way to concern myself, about the histories of any other of the many interesting antiquities which are scattered at random in the neighbourhood. Mysterious rumours had reached us up yonder in the great Babylon of glorious coast scenery (which some more daring adventurer in this terra incognita of the extreme west had stumbled upon by accident) within three or four miles of “St. Columb Town;” scenery surpassing, so it was said, anything we had yet seen, either at Ilfracombe or the Land’s End; of which latter place I notice, by the bye, that it has got itself as much written about of late as even the Oberland and Chamouni have done, or even the haunts of Baden-Baden.
On the morning of the day succeeding our visit to Castle-an-Dinas it had been arranged accordingly that our first visit to the coast should be paid. I was stirring so early, however, in consequence of the circumstance I have before narrated, and of the restlessness resulting from it, that I had time to visit the stately house amidst beautiful grounds, built by the present rector of St. Columb for the future Bishop of Cornwall (whenever Lord Palmerston may consent to his appointment), and be back at the breakfast-table before my companion made her appearance. Finally, it was about nine o’clock—the “harvest-ripening sun” shining out of a cloudless sky—when we started. The road from the town for a mile or two wound through deep lanes differing, as we found, somewhat from those which we had recently been traversing of the sister county. Oh, the pleasantness of the latter! may it be permitted to a modest Devonian, loving his native soil not the less though he treads it now so seldom, to observe? Oh, the delight of following their devious ways, purposeless, as he has done ere now, for the whole of a live-long day in the summers which are no more; ways that led past queer little villages and quaint homesteads, and skirted round patches of heather, and ran through brooks, and dived deep down into plantations of fir and pine, in the most absurd and eccentric manner; now running right up on end with distant glimpses of field and churchyard and meadow, and the great moor, mounted up against the far grey sky, like the waves of a silent sea, ridge after ridge cut sharp against the clear, cold light, and rolling away in glorious curve after curve, crested with foam-like granite, till the eye lost in looking at them all sense of boundary or distance; or anon tumbling precipitously down into cuttings of dark red clay, where it was almost twilight at three o’clock in the afternoon, and the red leaves (if it were autumn) dropped silently on the rain-flushed brook, that seemed to take them up very tenderly and carefully, and conveyed them away with a low dirge-like music, and a chant which no man could understand, over beds of grey lias and shale, to a grave in some quiet solitude or far-off western sea. Such are the lanes of Devonshire—such as I the present writer remember and know them—such as, surely in no spirit of cynicism, they are compared to matrimony’s “most holy and comfortable estate.” Those of Cornwall, as I have said, are of somewhat different characteristics—or, at least, those were with which we became acquainted on the present occasion. Somewhat unvarying, I should say, in those characteristics, and in the even tenour of their way not without a certain monotony. Yet pleasant enough, nevertheless; shut over by towering elm and tall cedar—places, at any rate, cool and calm, and of a very grateful