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‘I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, in such company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper, than the aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our own behoof.’

‘True; and now you will not go home and, as most tourists do, say that you know a place, without knowing the people who live in it–as if the human inhabitants of a range of scenery were not among its integral and most important parts–‘

‘What! are Copley Fielding’s South Down landscapes incomplete without a half-starved seven shillings a-week labourer in the foreground?’

‘Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? a premise without a conclusion? Is it not partly because the land is down, and not well- tilled arable, that the labourer is what he is? And yet, perhaps, the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets of landscape, when one considers that they are scraps of great, overcrowded, scientific England in the nineteenth century, is in itself the bitterest of satires. But, hush! there is another hymn commencing– not to be the last by many.’

* * * * *

We had landed, and laughed, and scrambled, eaten and drunk, seen all the sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions. Are they not written in Mr. Bamfield’s Ilfracombe Guide? Why has not some one already written a fire-and-brimstone romance about them? ‘Moresco Castle; or, the Pirate Knight of the Atlantic Wave.’ What a title! Or again–‘The Seal Fiend; or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman.’–If I had paper and lubricite enough, and that delightful carelessness of any moral or purpose, except that of fine writing and money-making, which possesses some modern scribblers–I could tales unfold–But neither pirate legends, nor tales of cheated insurance offices, nor wrecks and murders, will make us understand Lundy–what it is ‘considered in its idea,’ as the new argot is. It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing island. The whole three miles of granite table-land, seals, sea-birds, and human beings, are mere accidents and appendages–the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors’ science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a nobler and extinct race, then surely there will be pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, with its unglazed lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings! Really, my dear brothers, I am not in jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some such catastrophe–sentimental philosophy for the ‘enlightened’ few, and fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible as heathen ones) for the masses.–At that you may only too probably arrive–unless you repent, and ‘get back your souls.’

* * * * *

We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one of the real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the grey Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we sat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundred feet in air above the western main.

‘This is even more strange and new to me,’ said Claude, at length, ‘than anything I have yet seen in this lovely West. I now appreciate Ruskin’s advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, instead of lingering about the muddy seas and tame cliffs of the Channel and the German Ocean.’

‘How clear and brilliant,’ said I, ‘everything shows through this Atlantic atmosphere. The intensity of colouring may vie with that of the shores of the Mediterranean. The very raininess of the climate, by condensing the moisture into an ever-changing phantasmagoria of clouds, leaves the clear air and sunshine, when we do get a glimpse of them, all the more pure and transparent.’