l as the above; and there are two
magazines, printed and published at Barnstaple in the early years of
the nineteenth century, and which may be seen in the Athenaeum Library
of the town. They are the _Lundy Review_ and _The Cave_, and they
contain stories, poetry, puns, epigrams, acrostics, all with the mild,
faint flavour of a curate's tea-party in a cathedral town, and yet
invested with a kind of charm by the old-fashioned type, the yellowing
paper, and a small, dim picture--like the images of ourselves and our
furniture which we see in those old, round, diminishing mirrors--of the
life of a century ago. There is poetry of the Lake School fashion,
exhortations to Bideford and Woody Bay, to Lynton or "The Beauties of
Devon"; there is more poetry of the Byronic fashion, fierce and satiric
invective (yet never, be it understood, transgressing the bounds of
decency or good manners!) against the lady of the poet's affection;
there are stories, in which love and virtue triumph over temptation and
evil-doing; there is, of course, at least one story of a blind girl,
and one of a consumptive; there is much harmless punning, and in the
acrostics which the ladies of 1820 so much loved are fantastically
woven the names of the handsome young women of Barnstaple whose only
other record is now upon a tombstone.

There is a strong tone of "patriotism," if by that we mean a dignified
contempt for foreign manners and customs, foreign thought and foreign
speech. I call to mind one article, where the writer is
good-humouredly but supremely contemptuous of the French, because of
their manner of pronouncing classical names. What can you expect of a
nation, says he, for whom Titus Livy is no better than a
"tom-tit-liv-ing" in a hedge, and Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor
philosopher, becomes "Mark O'Rail," a mere beggerly, abusive Irishman?

This insularity of ours, which appears in a comic aspect in this
article in _The Cave_, continued throughout the nineteenth century, and
withstood the shock of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny without
apparently being in any way shaken; it is breaking now, indeed, under
the humiliations of the South African War, when we were made to feel
our isolation in Europe, and under the stress of this greatest war of
all, when at last we feel and say that we are proud to stand with the
nations of the Continent in a common cause.

But, in the nineteenth century, not only was our insular prejudice
extreme, but th