ANTIQUITIES OF OKEHAMPTON. 53 



Of sacrilege, behold, what heaps appear ! 



Nor blush to drop the tributary tear. « 



Here stood the font — here on high columns rais'd, 



The dome extended — there the altar blazed ; 



The shatter'd aisles, with clustering ivy hung, 



The yawning arch in rude confusion flung; 



Sad, striking remnants of a former age, 



To pity now might melt the spoiler's rage ! 



Lo ! sunk to rest, the wearied votary sleeps. 



While o'er his urn the gloomy cypress weeps. 



Here silent pause — here draw the pensive sigh — 



Here musing learn to live ; here learn to die ! ! ! '' 



W. E. 



Park Wood. 



ANTIQUITIES OF THE TOWN OF OKEHAMPTON, 



A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE OKEHAMPTON INSTITUTION. 



The idea of an ancient British town, as given us by the learned 

 Mr. Whittaker, so strikingly coincides with the localities of Oke- 

 hampton, that we might almost fancy it drawn from the place 

 itself. " The chief," he says " usually had his abode on the hill- 

 side, with a group of dwellings for his serfs, near the river below 

 it, and a road wound along the valley between them, gradually 

 ascending to a beacon that overlooked the whole." Here, when 

 war or the chase yielded an hour to home, the chieftain might 

 engage himself in appeasing the dissentions or presiding over the 

 festivities of his vassals. The smoke — we have the picture from 

 Ossian — rose from a hundred trees, blackening the rafters of his 

 hall; the wassail cup passed round, and the harp and song of 

 bards rose to a tale of other days : — until morning called him forth 

 again to his falcon or his hound, of which latter kind the segh-* 

 dog, a large slow race now extinct, seems to hate been a favoured 

 attendant. 



Such were the people who while the Romans and afterwards the 

 Saxons held the fairer portions of this island — long maintained 

 a rugged independence in tlie western counties. Hooker tlie an- 

 tiquary, who was chamberlain of Exeter in Elizabeth's reign, tells 



* Segh — The red or moose deer of this county. 



