132 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



Old inhabitants describe it as rising high above the adjoining 

 houses with stone mullioned windows, and a projecting open 

 porch having a bench on either side within, and a chamber over 

 it with battlemented parapet. Polwhele (History of Devonshire, 

 1 793-7) speaks of it as a mouldering structure, "with one turret 

 still existing, and the house has altogether a monasterial ap- 

 pearance." It was, in short, like a multitude of the old houses 

 that yet exist in this part of the country. Many will remember 

 another curious old house in the same town, burnt in the great 

 fire of 1866, which was inhabited by a local worthy, named 

 John Reed, a postmaster known far and wide for his upright- 

 ness and consistency of character. He used to declare that the 

 sanctum in which he was continually to be found with his long 

 clay pipe was, appropriately enough, the very room in which 

 Raleigh's servant threw a measure of beer over his master, on 

 first seeing him smoking. It is, at all events, pleasing to his 

 surviving friends to associate Reed's name with the legend. 

 These sojournings in Devon were probably the happiest days of 

 Raleigh's unquiet life. 



In the school-house, before mentioned, adjoining Ottery 

 Church, was born another dreamer, whose wanderings, however, 

 were in the shadowy realms of poetry and metaphysics, Samuel 

 Taylor Coleridge, the first to confer literary lustre upon a name 

 still worthily represented at Ottery St. Mary. His father, the 

 parish vicar and schoolmaster, was himself no mean scholar. 

 He published a Latin Grammar, now probably as little known 

 as the manuals of Roger Ascham. Tradition also tells of the 

 sonorous accents in which he would quote from the pulpit 

 Hebrew prophecy in the original. But the father is eclipsed 

 by his son's fame, " S. T. Coleridge, Esq., Gentleman, Poet, 

 and Philosopher in a mist." We ourselves have often slept in 

 the room where he first saw the light. Save the fact of his birth 

 at Ottery, but little remains to connect Coleridge's name with his 

 native country. We habitually refer him rather to the green 



