In the meanwhile, to show you something of what may be seen by
those who care to see, let me take you, in imagination, to a shore
where I was once at home, and for whose richness I can vouch, and
choose our season and our day to start forth, on some glorious
September or October morning, to see what last night's equinoctial
gale has swept from the populous shallows of Torbay, and cast up,
high and dry, on Paignton sands.

Torbay is a place which should be as much endeared to the
naturalist as to the patriot and to the artist. We cannot gaze on
its blue ring of water, and the great limestone bluffs which bound
it to the north and south, without a glow passing through our
hearts, as we remember the terrible and glorious pageant which
passed by in the glorious July days of 1588, when the Spanish
Armada ventured slowly past Berry Head, with Elizabeth's gallant
pack of Devon captains (for the London fleet had not yet joined)
following fast in its wake, and dashing into the midst of the vast
line, undismayed by size and numbers, while their kin and friends
stood watching and praying on the cliffs, spectators of Britain's
Salamis. The white line of houses, too, on the other side of the
bay, is Brixham, famed as the landing-place of William of Orange;
the stone on the pier-head, which marks his first footsteps on
British ground, is sacred in the eyes of all true English Whigs;
and close by stands the castle of the settler of Newfoundland, Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh's half-brother, most learned of all
Elizabeth's admirals in life, most pious and heroic in death. And
as for scenery, though it can boast of neither mountain peak nor
dark fiord, and would seem tame enough in the eyes of a western
Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay surely has a soft beauty of its own.
The rounded hills slope gently to the sea, spotted with squares of