262 THE EXETER ROAD 



' wandering life of military service,' a very amusing 

 view of what everybody else but that pompous his- 

 torian regarded as mere picnics. 



But Gibbon, although his person was not precisely 

 that of an ideal military commander, and although 

 the awkward squads he accompanied were not easily 

 comparable with the legions of old Rome, affected to 

 believe that the military knowledge he thus acquired 

 among; the hills and woodlands of Hants and Dorset 

 Avas of the greatest use in helping him to understand 

 the strates^ic feats of Csesar and Hannibal in Britain 

 or across the Alps. Let us smile ! 



In after years, when living at Lausanne, amid the 

 eternal hills and mountains of Switzerland, he looked 

 back upon those days with regret, alike for the good 

 company of his brother officers, the jovial nights at 

 the ' Crown ' in 'pleasant, hospitable Blandford,' and 

 for the interference those happy times caused to his 

 studies ; when, instead of burning the midnight oil, 

 he drank deeply of the two-o'clock-in-the-morning 

 punch-bowl. 



Many of Blandford's natives have risen to more 

 than local eminence. Latest amono- her distincruished 

 sons is Alfred Stevens, that fine artist who designed 

 the Wellington Monument in St. Paul's Cathedral, as 

 yet, unhappily, incomplete. He came into contact 

 with governments and red-tape, and broken in spirit 

 and in health by disappointments, died in 1875. A 

 tablet on the wall of his birthplace in Salisbury Street 

 records the fact that he was born in 1817. 



