SAMUEL PROUT, ARTIST. 
2G3 
battered about by the French in its early days, and the inhabitants 
were so continually in fear of them and the Spaniards, that those 
with riches (for the most part) never felt safe enough to build 
goodly houses for themselves, even within the walls and protected 
by the four castles, and the town never therefore had the chance of 
growing into anything like fair architectural importance. But 
there were many buildings of pictorial and historical interest in 
Plymouth at the beginning of this century. The solitary 
Elizabethan houses — like the building in Notte Street which now 
stands (with miserable modern surroundings) a lonely sentinel and 
landmark of local history (may its shadow never grow less in our 
time !) — were then clustered round with other equally quaint houses; 
storey over storey and gable beyond gable, in something like con- 
nected groups, which must have arrested the attention of the 
youthful Prout, who no doubt saw in them that beauty which is 
discoverable by the " judgment of the eye." 
An artist friend remarked to me the other day, "What a 
charming street Looe Street is." Well, no doubt it was once ; but 
it is very much on the decline, and nearly all its charm has been 
destroyed by the moderns. I remember, however, a venerable 
relative informing me that he spent a delightful honeymoon at an 
hotel there in 1815, and describing the street as possessing a great 
deal of architectural interest and respectability. 
No doubt at that time, or perhaps a little earlier, it was the 
most Proutesque street in Plymouth, the gradients helping the 
pictorial effect of gable above gable, and oriel above oriel; the 
diagonal broken here and there by the horizontal lines of the 
projecting cornices of the Queen Anne houses, and all the buildings 
stepping up, as it were, to the quaint old Guildhall — I mean the 
"James the First" building, which of course should never have 
been supplanted by the {then) New Guildhall. 
The large and ever-increasing area of stuccodom by which we 
are now surrounded and afflicted, which has relentlessly swept away, 
sometimes with barbarous indifference and scorn, nearly all our 
trees and pleasant places, had not then commenced its revolutionary 
course ; or, to use another simile, the stucco epidemic had not yet 
broken out when Samuel Prout was a boy here. Now of course 
it is very interesting to know (and I am sure everybody ought to be 
aware of the fact, because we are being so constantly reminded of 
it) that Plymouth is seven times as populous as it was in 1800, 
