tury door and a curious mutilated altar. The
south-transept window is to the memory of J. Douglas Cook, founder of
the _Saturday Review_, who returned to his native Cornwall to die. In
the churchyard are the graves of drowned seamen, British and foreign.
It is a striking and solemnising little church, quite in harmony with
a district of myth and sublimity. It is possible that some who come to
Tintagel for the first time may be disappointed. If so, they have
expected too much, or have expected the wrong thing. There is no gloss
of false romance about the place; the ruins have not the hollow
pretentious grandeur of some Norman castles; what we see is the
unadorned, unveiled reality of a majestic coast, the low, stark walls
of ruin on an immemorial site, the naked wind-beaten church on the
heights, the sea breaking into gaunt caverns below. Sheep feed within
the enclosure to which we scramble by a ragged path. Sentiment may
resent the hotel and the golfers, but any jarring note can easily be
ignored. Yet even Tennyson seems to have been disappointed at first;
afterwards, the spirit of the place sank into him and prevailed.
Perhaps old Hawker has described it best, in few pregnant words:--

"Hark! stern Dundagel softens into song.
They meet for solemn severance, knight and king,
Where gate and bulwark darken o'er the sea."

He gives us the words of Arthur, when the listeners "hush their hearts
to hear the king":--

"I would not be forgotten in this land:
I yearn that men I know not, men unborn,
Shall find, amid these fields, King Arthur's fame.
Here let them say, by proud Dundagel's walls--
'They brought the Sangraal back at his command,
They touched these rugged rocks with hues of God,'
So shall my name have worship, and my land."

And after the king had spoken:--

"That night Dundagel shuddered into storm--
The deep foundations shook beneath the sea."

And we have the grand final picture:--

"There stood Dundagel, throned; and the great sea
Lay, a strong vassal at his master's gate,
And, like a drunken giant, sobb'd in sleep."

There was a time when Trevena, with Bossiney and Trevalga, formed a
borough, and sent members to Parliament, of whom Francis Drake was
one. It needed little apology to disfranchise such a small corporation
as this, but the first Reform Bill had to deal with far greater
anomalies. Bossiney has other attractions than such memorie