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W$t ^caft fn tfjc iPags of <&ttrcn &nne. 



By Henry Kirke, M.A., B.C.L. 



S Derbyshire men, we owe a great debt to Thomas 

 Hobbes of Malmesbury, who by his book, 

 De Mirabilibus Pccci, first made known to a wonder- 

 ing world the marvels of our high Peakland. 

 Amongst the gay courtiers of the second Charles the Peak was 

 regarded as a place of exile, to which unfaithful or rebellious 

 wives could be banished by their indignant spouses. As Pepys 

 remarks in his Diary, " My lord (Chesterfield) did presently 

 pack his lady into the country in Derbyshire near the Peake, 

 which is become a proverb at Court — to send a man's wife to 

 the Devil's [cave] o' Peake when she vexes him.'' In emulation 

 of Hobbes, Charles Cotton wrote the Wonders of the Peak, 

 which was published in 1681. belauded by the ponderous 

 hexameters of Hobbes, and the inharmonious iambics of Cotton, 

 the marvels of our county attracted the curiosity of the beaux 

 and quidnuncs of London : in consequence, many learned 

 travellers, exploring the then unknown wilds of their native 

 land, turned their footsteps, with hope and expectation, 

 towards the n'orthern districts of Derbyshire. Of such was the 

 imaginative writer whose turgid prose has been preserved in 

 volume 783 of the Rawlinson MSS. in the Bodleian Library. 



To his name and profession we have no clue. From the internal 

 evidence, supplied by his journal, he must have been a man 

 of some erudition, as he seems familiar with the Latin classics, 

 and, to judge from certain technical expressions, not unversed 

 in legal lore. I should conjecture that he was a lawyer of one 



