lace by a western tower of the more ordinary type.
Fortunately Sir Gilbert Scott was called in to restore the church, and
refused to have a hand in destroying the spire, so the old parish church
stands as it was built, but with its spire drawn curiously out of the
perpendicular by the action of the sun's rays on the lead.

Within a few yards of St. Peter's stands the grammar-school, where Bishop
Jewel and his neighbour and enemy, Thomas Harding, went to school in the
early sixteenth century, and the poet Gay in the beginning of the
eighteenth. It was originally a chapel of St. Anne, and became a
grammar-school on the suppression of the chantries by Henry VIII. The
upper part of the building dates from 1450, but the crypt is much older,
and it is conjectured to be a Saxon foundation. The beauty of these
buildings--the church, the grammar-school, and the old houses--consists
so greatly in their surroundings, in the green of the grass and the
unfolding chestnut-trees against the old grey stone, the twinkle of
blossom by the angle of a house, and the soft sky of Devon above, that it
is difficult to reproduce; it is a beauty of atmosphere rather than of
outline, of sentiment and association.

I like, too, this lack of the "picturesque cult" which one finds in these
English towns; the beautiful is allowed always to be the useful, and the
family washing hangs on a line outside many a Tudor house as easily as in
a London slum. In Boutport Street--that old street that runs more than
halfway round Barnstaple, "about the port"--stands the Golden Lion Hotel,
which was formerly the town house of the Earl of Bath, and was enriched
in the seventeenth century by most beautiful moulded plaster ceilings and
fireplaces, made by Italian craftsman who were brought over from Italy.
The front of the building has been altogether modernized, but much of the
beautiful decorated interior work remains, to enrich the rooms where the
many unseeing visitors take their meals. The Trevelyan Hotel, in the
High Street, which presents to the street a most unpretentious exterior,
and where, indeed, the principal rooms are the Victorian of Dickens, with
ugly curtains and carpets, wall-papers and furniture, Victorian pictures,
and Victorian bronzes on the coffee-room mantlepiece, has treasures
hidden away up its dark staircases and in its cheaper and more modest
bedrooms--defaced and disregarded, alas!--an Italian ceiling of fine
scroll-work cut in half