The Romance of a Wayside Weed, 47 



As to later associations, they are too endless for 

 review. In the foreground lies the town, and from its 

 midst towers the abbey, the last flickering effort of 

 English architecture before the Reformation choked 

 out its life for ever ; a tall and stately but very cold 

 specimen of good late perpendicular work. It rises 

 above the ancient temple of Minerva, and covers frag- 

 ments of the older minsters — that which Osric, king 

 of the Worcester men, gave to a nunnery in 671 ; 

 that which Offa of Mercia raised in 775 ; that where 

 Eadgar, first king of all England, was crowned in 

 973 : and that which the Angevin John of Tours 

 erected in 1160. There to the right is Lansdown, 

 where the Parliament's men under Waller all but 

 wiped out the stout Cornishmen who * stood up for 

 their king ' under Sir Bevil Grenville in a fruitless 

 victory ; and the big tower on the top is Beckford's 

 Folly, built in a fit of Oriental recklessness by 

 ' Vathek ' Beckford, and now the landmark of the 

 cemetery which spreads over his vanished domain. 

 In the combe to the left, again, that huge pseudo- 

 classical manor-house is Prior Park, the vast rambling 

 home of Ralph Allen ; and Ralph Allen was the ori- 

 ginal of Squire Allworthy, whose grounds, as minutely 

 described in ' Tom Jones,' are here actually realised. 

 But if I went on talking all day I should never have 



