ese-ring, being a mass of layered granite capriciously
decomposed: these "unseen ones" (what a mysterious name for a
three-volumed Bentleyism!) I do not regret, for I know how to
appreciate those wonders, the only enchantment whereof is,
distance. So suffered I conveyance to Lostwithiel, a town lying in
a hollow under the pictorial auspices of Restormel Castle, whose
ivied ruins up the valley are fine and Raglandish: while the rest
were bolting a coach dinner, I betook me to ye church, and was
charmed with a curious antique font, and the tower, an octagon
gothic lantern with extinguisher atop, like this: as far as memory
serves me. Onward again, through St. Blazey, and a mining district,
not ill-wooded, nor unpicturesque, to the fair town of St. Austle,
which the piety of Cornish ancestors has furnished with another
splendid specimen of ecclesiastical architecture, the upper half of
the chief tower, a square one, being fretted on every stone with
florid carving, and grotesque devices: but what shall I say of
Probus tower, which from top to bottom is covered with delicate
tracery cut in granite? it rises above the miserable surrounding
village, a satire upon neighbouring degeneracy in things religious:
you must often have seen drawings of Probus at the Watercolour
Exhibition, as it is a regular artists' lion. At about half-past
six we got into Truro, a clean wide flourishing town with London
shops, a commemorative column, a fine spired church, bridges over
narrow streams, and, like most other West of England towns, well
payed and gas-lighted. From this, I had intended to go to Falmouth,
but a diligent brain-sucking of coach comrades induced me to jump
at once into a branch conveyance to Penzance, so passing sleepy
Redruth, Camborne, and St. Erth in the dark, I found myself safely
housed at the Union Inn, Penzance, at half-past eleven. Talking of
unions, the country is studded here as everywhere with them; fine
buildings put to the pernicious use of imprisoning for life those
whose only crime is poverty, and destined to be metamorphosed ere
long (so I prophesy) into lunatic asylums for desperate
ministerialists, prisons for the Chartists, veterinary colleges for
cattle with the rot, and as one good end, hospitals for the poor.
Near Redruth, I took noti